Reviving Veritas

Veritas is dying at Harvard, and we must look no further than our classrooms to see this tragedy unfolding. With even the best lecturers, truth comes across as an inert object in a fixed world. We are turned into empty receptacles for this pre-packaged knowledge, which we are then expected to regurgitate upon command. Implicitly, our curriculum dictates that we passively accept this rigid veritas and, correspondingly, the way the world is.

Theoretically, the discussion section that accompanies so many of our lecture courses is the place for this veritas to come alive. It is our chance to challenge “the truth” as given to us by our professors, engage with it, relate it to our own academic work, or even (gasp!) our personal experience. Through dialogue we have the opportunity to reconstruct our own understandings and piece them together with classmates into a fuller perception of reality.

But instead of resuscitating veritas, too many of our sections seem to drain even more life from it. I do not mean to attack the sizeable portion of section leaders who already do a wonderful job (nor the all-star professors and lecturers who lead many sophomore and junior tutorials with finesse). But how many of us have routinely had sections where TFs walk into class without a lesson plan or even a basic strategy for guiding conversations? How many have had TFs who do not know how to facilitate a discussion, to focus its inquiry, to corral its digressions? How often as a result have we had to suffer through sections dominated by classmates in love with their own voice and grubbing for grades? Too often we leave more confused and more turned off to the material than when we arrived. Too often there is too much talking, too little listening, and virtually no constructive dialogue going.

Such criticisms are hardly new, but, surprisingly, the two myths perpetuating these weekly disasters still linger:

Myth #1: Smart people automatically know how to teach. Most of us have already learned the fallacy of this one the hard way, but the University administration still seems to rely upon it. Many cite the high CUE scores most TFs receive as evidence of their competence, but these people fail to realize that such marks are merely the result of declining expectations of students who have come to accept unacceptable standards for teaching. It is admittedly reasonable at a large, research-oriented university to have graduate students lead sections instead of professors. Yet it is completely unreasonable not to require basic teacher training for all TFs.

In a 1995 meeting of the Faculty Council, it was agreed that teaching quality needed to improve. Yet mandates for bringing about such improvements were left to individual departments. Fortunately, some departments have done the right thing and have required TFs to attend a weekend training conference and have a section or two videotaped—services provided by the wonderful Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. Nevertheless, only about 40 percent of TFs make use of such resources at the Center. Why is it that the University has yet to make such basic training for all TFs mandatory? Is it really too much to ask for $40,000 per year? (Public, primary, and secondary schools with budgets infinitesimally smaller than Harvard’s require far more training to say the least!)

Myth #2: Smart people automatically know how to talk to each other. Because we think we are such bright bulbs, it makes it even harder to have meaningful conversations. We think we already know the answers, so we don’t bother listening to what everyone else has to say. Furthermore, we are so confident of the brilliance of our own points that we don’t bother to collect our thoughts before pontificating ad nauseum.

As a result, even well-trained TFs need to take a few minutes at the beginning of each semester to set a solid foundation for class discussions. The easiest way to set this foundation, considering our GPA obsessions, is to clearly explain how section participation will be graded. Often, such participation is 30 percent or more of final grades in humanities classes, but TFs rarely delineate how such grading occurs. TFs can use the participation grade to encourage improved listening, for example, by valuing responses to classmates’ comments over disconnected, individual contributions. I also (with inspiration from insightful student essay of Paul Davis ’07) propose that half our participation grade should be derived from a short, straightforward reading quiz given at the beginning of each section. Not only will a quiz keep well-intending procrastinators such as myself from falling behind on the syllabus, but it will improve the quality of discussions since everyone will be fairly well-versed with the material and not under as much pressure to demonstrate it.

Ultimately, Harvard will fail to live up to the high ideals of its motto unless it can successfully create a place for reviving veritas. And the more we breathe life into veritas through pedagogical improvements, the more we will in turn breathe life into our own lives. The more our courses lead us to recognize that knowledge is not a static fixture but an organic construction, the more we realize that the world in which we live is not permanent and inflexible but instead created by us and always able to be recreated anew. By acknowledging how our understanding of the world is constantly transforming, we become increasingly aware of our potential to transform our world into a more human place. It’s time we improve sections in order to bring veritas, and with it a part of ourselves, back from the dead.



Henry Seton ’06 is a social studies concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.