Intro Courses Come With Hefty Price Tag

Life Sciences 1a, “An Integrated Introduction to the Life Sciences: Chemistry, Molecular Biology, and Cell Biology”—the new introductory life sciences course offered this fall—represents a glimpse of what introductory lecture courses at Harvard and nationwide may look like in coming years.

But budget deficits in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), which are expected to exceed $40 million for fiscal year 2006 and could grow in coming years (see story, page 1), could make it challenging for Harvard to find the resources to offer such courses. In light of these deficits, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby insists that he is prepared to invest heavily in better introductory classes.

“We may truly set a new national paradigm,” said Senior Lecturer on Molecular and Cellular Biology Robert A. Lue, one of the course’s four instructors and a member of the group that devised the course last year. “I could imagine that introductory courses will be very different [in a few years time]. I think we can really rebuild the large course.”

The course features a number of aspects that haven’t been seen together in Harvard’s large lecture courses in the past, such as joint professor office hours, study meetings four nights a week led by advanced undergraduates, and two full-time preceptors in addition to the regular staff of teaching fellows.

Kirby praised the course, noting the large amount of time that its founders have dedicated to getting it up and running.

“I think it sets an extraordinary level of commitment that other large introductory courses would do very well to study. It’s been remarkable,” Kirby said. “We’ve discovered that we need to do more than we historically have been doing.”

While the course could provide a useful model for the creation of future courses—both in the sciences and in other disciplines—the resources required for numerous similar courses could prove daunting.

“We’ve set a new bar,” said Lue. But “we need to resource these courses adequately. The course is stinking expensive.”

The course’s budget for the semester included approximately one quarter of a million dollars for salaries, according to Ernie Chang, one of the course preceptors.

Life Sciences 1a, which is taught by four full-time faculty members, requires a much greater expenditure of faculty time than other courses with enrollments in the hundreds, such as English 124g, “Shakespearean Genres,” Moral Reasoning 22, “Justice,” and Chemistry 17, “Principles of Organic Chemistry.” Each had enrollments of at least 250 students and were taught by a single Faculty member.

There were 466 undergraduates enrolled in Life Sciences 1a this fall.

With the announcement at yesterday’s meeting of the full Faculty that the FAS’s deficit could rise to more than $100 million per year by 2010, some have expressed concern that it might not be feasible to offer many more team-taught introductory courses with significant instructional support, such as Life Sciences 1a.

Kirby insisted that this will not be the case.

“For this category of course, I know that it will take a great deal of resources—faculty and financial—in order to give people the time and support that it takes to make great courses to succeed,” Kirby said. “This doesn’t surprise me or worry me in the least and I would much rather make sure that we do succeed in this effort than to shortchange the creativity of the Faculty....Being excellent is not cheap.”

—Elaine Chen contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.