New Dean, Old Problem

The appointment of Monique Rinere as the first associate dean of advising programs is an encouraging sign that the College is ready to seriously address the shortcomings of Harvard’s advising system. Rinere, a former Princeton administrator, offers an impressive combination of talent and experience that will be needed to repair student advising at Harvard, and we are confident that she will implement a comprehensive solution that is both practical and effective.

Searching for some cure-all solution, some have called for a stipulation requiring all faculty members to participate in the advising, but such a plan is impractical and even counterproductive. The quality of the student advising program doesn’t depend on the amount of Nobel Prizes that advisors have won; rather, it depends on all advisors having a thorough grasp of the College’s academic requirements and procedures—as well as actual interest in providing guidance to often-overwhelmed Harvard undergrads. As long as this requirement is met, it matters little who does the actual advising.

Furthermore, it’s unlikely that senior faculty members would ever want to dabble in the advising process; some faculty members have even already voiced their opposition to the mandatory faculty advising proposal. Their refusal to serve is no great loss, though, since most professors know far less about undergraduate education than their own teaching fellows. Instead of forcing the glamorous giants of the academic world to bring their uninformed and unenthusiastic service into the advising program, the College should focus on further cultivating the promising resource that lies within the ranks of graduate students.

But the College is a vast and complex institution. No single advisor, however knowledgeable and well-intentioned, could ever be expected to know the answer to every question students might ask. The proper approach to a sound advising program, therefore, is not to compress all advising responsibilities onto individual advisors. Instead, a multifaceted scheme should be developed in which different areas of advising are handled by those who know them best. An integral component of such a solution is the participation of well trained peer advisors.

Prefects are currently prohibited from dispensing academic advice to freshmen, but this policy is senseless. As it stands, proctors serve as the academic advisors for first-years, but many of these proctors do not even study within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Freshmen would benefit far more from the counsel of prefects, who have experienced the College’s academic life and who are qualified to offer well-founded and helpful general academic advice. We have already called for the expansion and improvement of the prefect program; peer advising is a sensible and ideal service that the program should offer under a revamped advising scheme.

Junior and senior concentrators within each department, too, should be organized to offer peer advising to prospective concentrators and sophomores who are new to their departments. Some departments already have some form of intraconcentration peer advising in place, but all departments—especially the larger ones like Government and Economics—should strive to assemble effective peer advising services. The CUE Guide, after all, can only tell students so much about any class, and it can never replace personal communication with an upperclass concentrator.

No single improvement can address all of the shortcomings of student advising at Harvard. The College must make a serious and concerted effort to introduce a series of changes that will provide practical and effective solutions to this perennial problem, and we fully expect that such a process will occur under the capable leadership of Dean Rinere.