All the Faculty’s Failures

This was to be a banner year for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). With the drama surrounding former University President Lawrence H. Summers firmly behind it and a trusted leader, interim Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles at the helm, the Faculty would finally be able to focus on reexamining pedagogy and completing an inspiring curricular review. FAS would be primed for a heady future after the handover to a new dean at the end of the year.

If only it were so. Instead, leadership shake-ups, a budget deficit, pedagogical malaise, turf wars, and damaged relations with students were the common threads tying together a year that was disappointing by any standard. McKay Professor of Computer Science Michael D. Smith, who was named Dean of the Faculty Monday, faces quite a challenge in uniting and inspiring the Faculty.

The main business of the year for the full Faculty was to complete the Curricular Review, which was limping into its fifth year. One would expect that an opportunity to reinvent the meaning of a liberal education would draw Harvard’s academics out in droves. Yet anemic attendance at Faculty meetings—when the Faculty bothered to have them at all—served as depressing indicators of Faculty apathy. Unsurprisingly, the Curricular Review largely fell flat. Instead of crafting a meaningful statement on what it means to be educated in today’s world, professors only seemed to care that their parochial corner of academia be included, leaving Harvard with an uninspired retread of the Core Curriculum. It will be up to Smith and Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies Jay M. Harris, who will lead the General Education committee which is to implement the Review’s findings, to breathe life and coherence into the new curriculum.

Furthermore, the Faculty repeatedly balked at making teaching evaluations mandatory for all courses. Far from creating a “Harvard version of RateMyProfessor.com,” as one professor claimed at a Faculty meeting, evaluations are a valuable tool for pedagogical improvement, without which teachers are essentially feedback-blind. Though few professors opt out of such evaluations, leaving the option open at all amounts to providing a sop to professors’ whims and egos. While the Faculty did vote to mandate evaluations of all teaching fellows (TFs)—a critical step in the University’s recognition of the importance of teaching ability among those responsible for students’ education here—its failure to include professors was a glaring omission and one we hope the Faculty corrects next year.

This year also saw the release of a landmark report by the Task Force on Teaching and Career Development that sounded the alarm on the sorry state of pedagogy at Harvard. Just as importantly, the report identified the problem as stemming from Harvard’s institutional priorities and culture and recommended 18 concrete changes to begin to fix the problem. Three of these changes—monetary incentives for top-notch teaching, the creation of a culture of peer evaluation, and making course evaluations mandatory—are particularly important. Beyond those changes, we hope that teaching is made a more important part of tenure decisions, a critical step for changing the culture of teaching at an institution where so much is driven by career advancement. We also hope that FAS considers the possibility of expanding the number of lecturers that Harvard hires and repeals its irrational and patronizing eight year limit on the terms of full-time teachers, instead opting for contracts that can be renewed indefinitely.

Yet rather than taking steps to remedy these issues and move toward creating a culture in which teaching ability is valued commensurately with research acumen, the Faculty again turned up its nose at an issue that should dominate attention. The Faculty meeting in which the Task Force’s report was to be discussed was one of the most poorly attended of the year. We hope that Faust and Smith do not allow the report to gather dust on a shelf and instead make it a guiding document for their tenures.

The two should also take a page from former FAS Dean William C. Kirby and former University President Lawrence H. Summers’ playbook in making the improvement of student life at Harvard College a priority. The FAS dean in particular has an oft-unrecognized influence over the undergraduate experience as the final authority on the funding of student initiatives. Under interim Dean Jeremy R. Knowles—and with last year’s firing of former Deputy Dean of the College Patricia O’Brien—the student-friendly age of yesteryear came to an abrupt close. Indeed, without Summers many important projects, from the Pub and the Lamont café to the renovations of Dunster and Mather dining halls, would never have happened. Investing in the student experience—including academic advising, which despite recent initiatives remains very weak—must continue to be a priority, and it will only be so if Smith embraces it.

Dean-designate Smith will also be in charge of the ongoing faculty expansion, and will play a key role in apportioning hiring across departments. This spring, Knowles proposed that the expansion be focused almost exclusively on the sciences, with hires in the social sciences and humanities only to replace departing faculty. The large number of students concentrating in the social sciences, however, means that Harvard needs more social science teachers. We hope Smith balances FAS’ research priorities and teaching needs and does not give all new appointments to the sciences by default. One promising solution to solving the teaching shortage may be to get social scientists from other faculties to teach undergraduates.

In many ways, this past year was a missed opportunity for the Faculty. But we hope that the combination of a new president, a new dean, a new curriculum, and a new general education committee proves to be the antidote for the Faculty’s woes.