The Culture of Quantity

By Alexander Bevilacqua

The recent faculty essays on aspects of the Harvard College Curricular Review have been the most exciting contribution to the debate about reforming the college so far. The essays focus primarily on the general education aspect of the curriculum, and their proposals range from defenses of the Core Curriculum to recommendations for a distributional requirement or even suggestions for new integrative, interdisciplinary approaches. A central theme of the professors’ thoughts is the need for students to learn to think and read critically, a process which Buttenwieser University Professor Stanley Hoffmann terms “the training of judgment.” A related issue, but one which not all professors seem to have tackled, is one we students face daily: the problem of reading.

Our courses’ reading lists are inflated—taking a regular course load implies upwards of a few hundred pages of reading a week, and part of our self-definition and pride as overachieving students stems from our ability to plough through an entire Henry James novel or Freud treatise in one night. Occasionally professors admit that we are not really expected to read all of the material; and some teaching fellows suggest that the trick is to read one part of the assignment very carefully, and skim the rest. But the assignments remain, and as we rush through the semester without a chance to look back on what we were doing in previous weeks, it is often hard to remember what we labored on even just recently, let alone what we studied last semester.

Of course, as Dillon Professor of International Affairs Jorge I. Domínguez writes, “a liberal education is what remains after you have forgotten the facts that were first learned while becoming educated.” And it is true that we are young and have lots of ground to cover. But as we speed-read our way through the semester, the acquisition of critical judgment does not always seem to be the priority. Save for the concentrated spurt of penning an essay, we do not always have the time, nor do we learn to develop the patience, to dissect arguments, to grapple with difficult texts or theoretical problems we encounter. Sections face the absurd task of making 15 or more people reflect on 100 pages of dense writings in under an hour. No wonder they are often a farce, and, in a popular definition, more the simulation of a discussion than an actual one. Students express unrelated but intelligent-sounding thoughts, and are then released to worry about their next assignment.

Some faculty members are concerned that we are not learning to think, that, in the words of Porter University Professor Helen Vendler, “Our students need to be taught the very process of introspection, a process lost amid the external pressures of career success.” Professor Vendler proposes that each student develop a list each year of books to read for pleasure, in order to develop a life-long excitement about reading and thought. The idea is well-meant, but seems quaint, considering the present reading overload to which we are subjected. Vendler worries that Harvard is not teaching us the “pleasurable vagaries of independent personal reading,” and indeed she is not off the mark. But mandatory voluntary reading, without a rethinking of the methodologies of courses, would not help out at all.

Despite these problems, our professors seem to feel a need to assign this much reading. Do they want to prove that they are making us work hard? Is quantity really the only means they have of gauging our engagement? Are they so out-of-touch with our thought processes that they dare not evaluate them, that they do not believe they can make us think better and harder? Quality is much more difficult to quantify. Kenan Professor of Government Harvey Mansfield writes that “Harvard has become too easy” and that “there is a pressing need to make our curriculum more demanding.” It is worth asking what the word “demanding” means, whether it implies an additional 100 weekly pages, or something different.

One must not overlook that our professors, with their “publish or perish” motto, are prey to the same issues which beset us. Horror stories abound about the way in which academic work by the great minds who teach us sometimes gets rushed to print without proper proofreading. Some graduate students who work for professors are forced to drop everything and spend the three days prior to a printers’ deadline reading a professors’ text through; undergraduate faculty aides sometimes correct mistake-addled bibliographies only hours before a conference paper must be given. Something must be seriously amiss for these authors and their editors to rush the process of production so much that their product is flawed.

As long as these problems can be interpreted as just endemic to the academic world, they are troubling but not tragic. It is worth considering whether the triumph of quantity over quality might impede our functioning as individuals and as members of the society of tomorrow. The daily barrage of information from news sources does not correspond to the time we have to really process or understand it. It is quite possible to imagine a day in which the pressure for productivity, fueled by concerns for advancement, will trump careful, critical thought, the crucial “necessity to make distinctions and to avoid sweeping generalizations and extrapolations,” in Professor Hoffmann’s words.

There are ways out of the overload. We students can—and do—reclaim meaningful discussion whenever possible, by squeezing in a short debate over dinner, or by attempting to share our thoughts and discoveries with our roommates. Forcing ourselves to close-read, question, think, and above all, remember, is all we can do. We cannot change academic standards, but we can make the world of college our own. An incredibly fortunate combination of factors grants us four years to reflect, four years to define for ourselves what matters and how we will approach the world. Productivity should not be our overarching principle in this place. As the Review develops, and the faculty continues to debate what the curriculum should be like, the problem of reading should not be overlooked. It will be central, whatever shape Harvard College may take.

Alexander Bevilacqua ’07, a Crimson editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Leverett House.