And So It Goes

I promised myself I wouldn’t write my final column on all the topics I didn’t get to cover this semester. But I figure that what’s good enough for The New York Times’ public editor is good enough for me. So, inevitably, here is the final manifesto of my columnistship, in four parts:

1) The administration. In my nation- building course this semester, we discussed the transition from feudalism to absolutism. The logic of absolutist state-building basically came down to this: put one guy in charge and generate a hierarchy of technocrats, each with his or her own specialized turf, below the leader.

That’s basically what has been happening at Harvard over the last four years. Mass. Hall measures such as the Allston “tax,” which raids school and departmental endowments to create a pool of money for building across the river, have challenged departmental autonomy. Mass. Hall’s moves to unify alumni databases and direct incoming funds to the parts of the University it sees fit will decrease fundraising independent of the central administration. And authority within the administration has also been centralized, as when Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences William C. Kirby created a “super-dean” in charge of both academics and student life at the College, displacing former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68, who used to preside over student life.

At the same time, a bureaucracy of sometimes comically hyper-specialized functionaries has developed. Harvard’s administration now boasts deanlets, assistant provosts, senior associate provosts and divisional deans. The Crimson reported Monday that Harvard is creating two vice provost jobs and a senior vice provost position to cover international affairs, research policy, and faculty development and diversity. With Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 in place as the College’s super-dean, University Hall has also expanded with a cornucopia of new “deanlet” positions—the College now has no fewer than nine associate and assistant deans.

So over the last four years, Harvard has slowly moved toward its absolutist mode, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—feudalism wasn’t so fun, either, and anyone who has sat in on one of Harvard’s endless committee meetings knows that it takes a long time to do very little here. But sometimes it’s important to call a spade a spade.

2) The students. There is an overwhelming culture of complaint at Harvard. Students bemoan the amount of work they have like adolescent boys comparing shoe sizes. They curse Harvard for bad TFs, uninspiring lecturers, the quality of dorm life (and dorm food), the fact that the College—gasp—officially enforces Mass. state alcohol law, poor advising, and a smorgasbord of more petty annoyances.

Students compare Harvard to other universities desperately trying to increase their admissions yield by wasting their endowments on climbing walls, waterslides and jacuzzis. Or they compare Harvard to the state school all their friends went to back home, where partying begins Wednesday night and beer funnels are more common than response papers.

It’s important to keep applying pressure on the University and College administration, even to ask for too much—that’s how we got Loker Pub Nights, after all. What bothers me about all the complaining we do is that some students really feel entitled to moan about Harvard as though they deserve waterslides, cable in every dorm room, and course reading lists that only contain picture books. A lot of us undergraduates need to get some perspective. Sure, Harvard has some lousy advisors, unintelligible TFs, and a sometimes muted party scene, and the University needs balanced criticism (see below). But be fair—Harvard does a better job teaching, housing, feeding and caring for its own than almost any other institution in the world.

3) The Harvard College Curricular Review. Quelle dommage. The latest reports from the committees are pretty gutless, and they certainly don’t reflect a consistent or even compellingly inconsistent vision for undergraduate education. The more drastic proposals include a requirement that every undergraduate have an “international experience” with or without the proper language and culture training one needs to make it worthwhile. Indeed, “international experience,” it seems, can mean interning in an air-conditioned glass-and-steel office building in London over one summer. Now that’s broadening.

But the most important thing to consider is what the committees who haven’t released reports aren’t telling us. Members of the Faculty were so skeptical of the General Education Committee’s recommendations that the it has decided to go back to the drawing board.

The entire Review should follow Gen Ed’s lead. Faculty discontent suggests that the Review will ultimately fail to pass a Faculty vote, anyway. The process should begin over again with the goal of producing recommendations that really challenge or extend our notions of what an undergraduate education should be.

4) The conclusion. As I have been writing this column this semester, I have made the case that the Faculty needs to work proactively to better undergraduate education, that Larry Summers must battle perception even as he battles reality, and that students have to take more responsibility for their education instead of simply complaining about it. Harvard is a great place—as long as you don’t need to be babied.

Stephen W. Stromberg ’05 is a Russian studies concentrator in Adams House. His column appears regularly.