Expos May Not Be Perfect, But It Serves A Critical Function

To the editors:



I am writing to respond to a recent editorial’s proposition that Harvard undergraduates would be well served if Expository Writing (Expos) were dismantled (“Eliminate Mandatory Expos,” Oct. 26). Although I recognize that no required course can possibly please everyone, I would like to offer an argument for why the course serves a critical purpose for freshman. In doing so, I would also like to counter the editorial’s generalizations with facts.

First, the claim that Expos is “useless and boring” to students is not borne out by the evidence of considerable satisfaction among those who take the course. The program’s evaluations each semester repeatedly show students referencing and then refuting an urban myth about the “dreaded” Expos requirement. At the end of the term, students say they found the course much better than they had heard it would be. They voice surprise that they actually learned something useful about academic writing and found the intellectual projects they undertook to be challenging and engaging. Many describe those assignments and the experience of the course to be the source of inspiration in considering a concentration. In fact, such is the ubiquity of these testimonials that we may wonder what fuels the urban myth to begin with, beyond the a priori stigma that adheres to a required course and—as CUE evaluations show—a minority’s negative experience of Expos.

The phenomenon stems in part from the disconnect that students can legitimately feel when they move from Expos to courses in their concentrations, where writing assignments in the disciplines place new demands on them. What counts for evidence in psychology, for example, is different from what counts for evidence in anthropology, history, economics, literature, or the life sciences. What is considered an interesting question in one discipline will be irrelevant in another. No single Expos course can possibly equip a student to know how to write as a specialist in a field, much less in several.

But Expos can and does help students develop analytical habits fundamental to thriving in an academic culture. As most students know, Expos preceptors work intensively with their students to guide them in thinking logically and deeply, not glibly, about intellectual problems, supporting claims with evidence, anticipating and transparently confronting countervailing evidence and ideas, and honestly acknowledging and effectively deploying sources. The course also introduces students to the intellectual and emotional experience of writing as a process—discovering and revising ideas by writing and re-writing, giving and making use of feedback. Taken seriously, a course in Expos can be transformative and transportable for all students since all will inevitably be asked to write and think analytically for the rest of their time at Harvard and beyond.

Expos preceptors, faculty, and administrators share the concern that there is a disconnect between the foundation of skills and principles laid by Expos and the writing instruction that students receive in their sophomore, junior, and senior years. To be sure, many professors, tutors, lecturers, and section leaders make clear to their students the relationship between discipline-specific expectations and the elements of analytical writing that are common to the disciplines. At the same time, however, when students receive minimal feedback on their writing or are not introduced to the specific requirements of writing in the discipline, they feel justifiably disappointed.

Both Expos and the concentrations share the responsibility for closing this gap. Fortunately, an increasing number of faculty and teaching fellows (TFs) around campus have been making efforts to hold exchanges with preceptors on several important questions. What should a one-semester introductory academic writing course do for students? What are its necessary limits? Where can the uptake of the skills and principles learned in Expos be articulated in, say, a sophomore tutorial? How can writing skills in a concentration be sequenced through senior year? How can careful assignment design and attentive faculty and TF responses to student writing push undergraduates to the higher levels of persuasive analytical writing that should be at least one mark of a Harvard liberal education?

Does Expos need to work on integrating its lessons more powerfully and usefully into the undergraduate curriculum? Certainly. The program’s preceptors, however, are not the problem, as the editorial implies, and claims about the diminishing quality of hires are altogether false, as is the speculation linking the quality of instruction to “tightened spending within the program’s budget.” The measures of fiscal restraint undertaken in the past two months, primarily around social events spending, extra compensation practices, and publication costs, have had nothing to do with salaries or hiring.

Each year nearly 400 applicants vie for a handful of openings in Expos, and we are able to hire competitively from an applicant pool that boasts both active professional writers with extensive publication credits and scholars with J.D.s and Ph.D.s in literary studies, history, biological and cultural anthropology, and philosophy. Our preceptors have their degrees from the best graduate programs in the country—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania, to name just a few. They come to Expos with a compelling combination of outstanding teaching records and disciplinary expertise. Instructors with such unparalleled abilities—and this is where the editorial gets it right—do deserve higher salaries.

Yet it is surely also incumbent upon Expos to hire from a wider variety of academic fields. Preceptors would be able to draw from one another’s disciplinary knowledge and make the program even more responsive to our students’ wide-ranging interests and to professors’ expectations of writing in fields that are not currently represented in our faculty appointments.

Expos and the College can also dramatically expand the trained peer support currently offered to students as they work on their analytical writing. Far from being “under-utilized,” the Writing Center cannot keep up with demand from concentrators and senior thesis writers. To address the need, Expos has committed more funds to the Center to add more tutorial hours; furthermore, the program has recruited and funded advanced graduate students as Departmental Writing Fellows to help students with discipline-specific writing in the concentrations. For this pilot year, the Fellows are currently in History and Psychology, and we hope to create two more Fellowships in two of the eight tracks in Life Sciences. Conceivably, many more departments could institute such Fellowships.

But despite these actions, there is more to be done in and out of Expos to improve the writing experience of Harvard undergraduates. Expos would be the first to say that revision is a virtue. But calls for revising the program have to be motivated by a close reading of actual conditions and by a deeper understanding of the state of undergraduate writing—including the fact that the lessons of Expos ought to be carried through and developed by our students and their instructors over four years.



THOMAS R. JEHN

Cambridge, Mass.

October 31, 2007

The writer is interim director of the Expository Writing Program.