Speaking Genius

There has been plenty of finger-wagging lately over the quality of undergraduate instruction at Harvard: “The professors can’t teach!” we students claim, pointing to consonants on our transcripts and snoozing peers in lecture. We’ve got reason to complain: We’re here to learn, and in order for us to understand how to do something, someone needs to teach us how to do it.

Yet such complaints expose an often overlooked double standard: We expect our professors to teach us the skills we need to know, yet we expect our professors to somehow innately know how to teach without ever having been taught how to do so. Just as our abilities to craft theses don’t simply materialize in the night, professors are not hatched from graduate schools knowing how to teach. Teaching itself is a skill that must be learned and taught.

Preschool through 12th grade teachers must earn and maintain certain degrees and certificates in order to teach; why is this not so for professors? At a recent meeting of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, interim University President Derek C. Bok pointed out, “The Ph.D., in my knowledge, is the only major professional program in the United States that does not prepare students for the activity that they will spend most of their professional lives [doing].” Therein lies the problem.

One day in high school, after my history teacher finished describing a particularly complex assignment, a boy in my class complained, “I don’t speak genius.” Clearly, our teacher had not explained the assignment in language the entire class could understand. Professors must be able to communicate subtle and complex information in our language. In other words, they need to learn how to stop speaking “genius” and start speaking intelligent undergraduate.

The University must assume responsibility for incentivizing its professors to teach well. Teaching fellows (TFs) may be successfully motivated to teach well with monetary rewards, such as the new Derek C. Bok Awards for Excellence in the Teaching of Undergraduates, but this method is unlikely to work for professors. For TFs, good CUE ratings translate to job offers; for tenured faculty, this is irrelevant. (Moreover, in many departments in which there are generally more specific class requirements, ratings are irrelevant. If you must take Chem 60 to graduate, you will, regardless of its dismal CUE rating.)

The unfortunate reality is that the publish-or-perish mentality forces many professors to choose career advancement over spending the time and energy necessary to improve their teaching. It would be unrealistic to expect this mentality to disappear. What the College must do, therefore, is make good teaching a crucial aspect of, rather than a distraction from, career advancement. The Bok Center, the stated mission of which is to “enhance the quality of teaching and learning in Harvard College courses,” is a good step in the right direction. Professors are encouraged to attend lectures offered at the Center, collaborate with the Center’s staff when designing curricula, and even watch an online video that teaches the subtle art of vowel enunciation.

But the Bok Center is not doing enough. The Center must become what it should already be: an essential resource, familiar to every faculty member, that supports a high standard of instruction. Poor instructors should be required to attend classes at the center. The Center should require that professors have students evaluate courses partway through the term. Additionally, professors and other faculty should observe and assess their peers’ teaching. Any professor who fares poorly on these evaluations should be required to take remedial courses at the Center. If they continue to receive poor feedback on their teaching, they would continue to visit the Center until they shape up or ship out (well, maybe not “shipped out,” since tenure does not permit that, but possibly placed into a teaching purgatory?).

Professors who receive particularly positive feedback should be rewarded in ways they would find meaningful. Trial and error would compile a list of ways to honor well-liked and effective professors, though a few ideas already come to mind. Titular accolades, such as the existing Harvard College Professorship, could serve as compelling incentive. (In this arena, Harvard might be wise to follow Yale, which presents six faculty members in six fields with teaching awards and several minutes of public praise on Class Day.) Good teachers could choose to instruct younger or less effective teachers in methods they themselves have found successful. They could be offered coveted living situations, either in the role of House Master or in local real estate, or could be invited to chair committees on undergraduate education and extracurricular life

If nothing else, Harvard professors are a smart bunch, and their paths to Harvard’s storied halls have been paved by pronounced senses of can-do. But, to throw an old adage on its head, we seem to have arrived at a place in which those who can do can’t teach. Now it is up to Harvard to motivate its professors to teach well. At a new Harvard where effective teaching is a sought-after skill both learned and taught, fluency in genius will be made evident by its effective translation to its future speakers: captivated and contented undergraduates.



Emily R. Kaplan ’08-’09 is a social anthropology and English and American language and literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House.