Harvard’s Professors Aren’t the Problem — The Lecture Is

From Nobel laureates to industry legends, it’s no secret that Harvard’s courses are invariably helmed by the world’s finest faculty. Of course, these commanding few at the apex of academia are bound to send shockwaves from the podium. Aren’t they?

Not quite. Enter any large lecture hall at Harvard, and you won’t be hard pressed to find dozens of students dozing off or turning to their phones. It seems like Harvard's classes have turned the lively student into quite an elusive creature.

The problem is a subtle, yet major design flaw in the basic lecture model: To have some of the most distinguished names in academia address rows of nameless students — sometimes seated stories above — strikes as coldly impersonal. It’s a bad way to teach.

For all the woes of the classic lecture — from low attendance rates to passive learning — its most unglamorous quality is the rift it creates between students and professors. Lecture-based learning, while lauded as a portal to expert insight, robs students of intimate access to their instructors.

Enrollment counts need not reach triple digits — like in the case of CS50: “Introduction to Computer Science” or Justice: “Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times” — to stunt student-faculty relationships. Even courses with only a fraction of the enrollees of Harvard’s mega-classes can leave students languishing anonymously in the lecture hall.

Further, most outlets for closer faculty interaction, like office hours, spotlight only those who tread the extra mile. Office hour attendees have much to relish beyond a hasty review session — they will likely have their names learned and become comfortable addressing their professors, among other perks — and deservedly so.

But making office hour attendance an unwritten requisite for more impactful student-faculty engagement can be prohibitive for many. Having to consistently carve out blocks of time for office hours, often across multiple courses, leaves students hemmed in by the pressure to plan and perform without end. That’s not even accounting for the fact that for larger courses, teaching assistants conduct the lion’s share of out-of-class instruction, fielding questions and facilitating discussions during sections or office hours.

The most immediate, though least promising, recourse available to faculty members is to wean themselves off the mic and open the floor to student contributions. Otherwise, students will falter as active participants in the project that is their learning.

Still, for many professors, scouting around for raised hands is far from a tried-and-true antidote to low engagement. Students all too often squander open invitations to wade into classroom conversations, thanks to an amalgam of anxiety, poor preparation, and fancy tech.

Successful bids to draw out more student voices must feature some form of purposeful questioning and dialogue, entwined with a smidge of name learning. Professors should introduce less traditional avenues for participation; for example, instead of seeking long-form commentary alone, instructors might solicit more rapid-fire responses, allowing students’ minds to churn and nerves to calm early on.

This doesn’t mean upping the stakes for student participation; rather, it’s about tapping into student thinking more proactively. Even facing formidable class sizes, professors must attend to student thinking with absolute zeal. These moments — because they bring student-faculty interaction to the fore of learning — are what turn the notoriously passive lecture experience into an active intellectual exercise.

But ultimately, as potent as more interaction is, combing through hundreds of students is no small feat. As such, Harvard ought to muster up a dash of its endowment to hire a few more professors and shrink class sizes. Expanding the University’s faculty by even a fistful could animate classrooms and lecture halls across campus.

And if neither solution meaningfully pans out, then perhaps the best recourse we have as students is to grapple with the anonymity problem ourselves. Tucked away in the entrails of massive classes, we are left with only a few options. Maybe we should look beyond the University’s star-studded roster and instead toward other gems — namely, the peers and graduate students who form our teaching teams. Or perhaps, we should meet professors where they are, and come to lecture prepared to lob questions and ignite debate.

The problem was never a lack of name-learning. If it were, we’d need not look further than name tags for a solution. Rather, it’s the inveterate split between student and professor that higher education can’t seem to outrun.

World-class or not, the mic-wearing “sage on the stage” is, ultimately, our educator. We see them on their perch. All we ask is that we are seen, too.

Michael A. Babayev ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Hurlbut Hall.