An Academic Color-by-Numbers

Harvard is a university particularly enamored by statistics: a nine percent acceptance rate, a $35 billion endowment, and 15 million holdings in the library system. These are numbers that define and meter out the quantity of Harvard’s prestige. We are superior to our peer institutions, it seems, not on account of the efflorescence of our studies but on account of the upward slope of our trend lines. Immeasurable qualities are no longer important; in a quantified world, a given quality’s inability to cram into the cell of a spreadsheet has become a fatal flaw.

And now the culture of quantification has leached down to the practice of everyday learning, with the exploding popularity of several new student-made web tools that offer a searchable directory of courses by their scores on the Q evaluation index. These web tools distort an already skewed view of academics at Harvard by contributing to a culture that values quantity at the expense of quality.

In a less-enlightened day, students once browsed through the Courses of Instruction looking for classes whose descriptions were sympathetic to their own interests, perhaps checking afterwards the reviews of prior enrollees. Poor rubes!

In this streamlined age, the process is inverted: first, come to the table with a number in mind; afterwards, you can bother with the actual topic and content of the course. The cluttered old catalog, with its idiosyncratic and long-winded descriptive paragraphs following the course titles, has been rendered obsolete by crisp tables of course titles each followed by a chain of 10 numbers. Nowadays, that’s all you need.

Students have no doubt been looking for academic shortcuts for as long as learning has been going on, but this latest development tells us something about ourselves that perhaps we’d be better off not knowing. One might be tempted to blame the enterprising programmers behind these Q-searching tools for leading Harvard students down the road of cynical educational technician-ship. Such a claim is unfair. They aren’t administering the poison; they’re just leaving it on the shelf for the children to find.

No, we’re the ones to blame, sitting around in dining halls choosing our classes by scorecard, when we ought to be taking a hard look at whether we’ve finally gone over the edge of the academic cliff. And we ought to ask ourselves some serious questions about what, exactly, it is we’re doing here at Harvard the first place.

It’s a false reduction to claim that Harvard students are simply lazy. By contrast, this is what makes the whole proposition so puzzling: Harvard students are, if anything, masochists, morbidly proud of the grisliest wounds incurred by their work. Stress doesn’t signify poor time-management skills but ambition, that most desirable of Harvard traits. The thousands of pages to be read or scores of problem sets to be completed are cudgels for asserting our masochistic superiority over our peers.

Why is it, then, that we’re so excited about getting our courses listed for us by workload and difficulty? Perhaps it’s because we’ve ceased to think about courses as pursuits and given over entirely to thinking of them as obligations. A favorite word to look for in the Q is ‘painless’, as if the predominant emotion felt in a class is otherwise pain and misery. A study card has more in common now with an income tax form than with an expression of intellectual curiosity.

It’s easy to file this commentary into a bin of wistful idealism, but there are very real ramifications to the rampant quantification of our academic life. The Q simply wasn’t designed to be a first stop in course selection, and it’s ridiculous to think that we can gain very much in the way of useful information from a string of highly subjective numbers or an ordering based on very fuzzy ranking.

Worse, though, this focus on ratings encourages us to assume there is a measurable and identifiable route to academic happiness. There isn’t, and when we fool ourselves into thinking there is, we set ourselves up for an unpleasant fall.

As a student, I reserve the right to stumble into things; I consider this the most valuable prerogative of undergraduate life. I don’t want to know precisely how my classes rank. Perhaps this means I’ll find myself in class where I loathe the professor or am doubled over by work. Better to have found this on my own terms than to have trusted a dubious number that predicts very little about what I want in my academic life.

So let’s leave the Q-searching tools as they are: interesting final projects for computer science classes, and little else. Kindergarteners grow up from the color-by-numbers in Highlights magazine to blank pages for drawing their own pictures. Let’s make sure that, when it comes to academic color-by-numbers, we remain grown-ups.



Garrett G. D. Nelson ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies and visual and environmental studies concentrator in Cabot House.