Misplaced Priorities

The campus erupted in ravenous outrage at the end of hot breakfast. Cuts to shuttle services evoked literal cries of bloody murder, and when athletes lost their free sweatsuits, it was as if the shirts had been taken off their backs. But for all the indignation on House e-mail lists and in The Crimson, students have remained relatively quiet about more serious cuts affecting the quality of the undergraduate experience.

Take, for example, the English Department, where for the first time in 30 years we have no junior faculty specializing in Medieval, Renaissance, Eighteenth Century, or Romantic literature. With a hiring freeze, a rapidly aging senior faculty, and an academic search process that takes years, it’s a realistic possibility that within the near future there will be nobody left to teach Coleridge or Swift, formerly staples of a liberal arts education. This trend toward faculty shortages might seem less alarming if it were not occurring in other departments as well. Just last year, the Economics Department lost three professors along with the resources to hire visiting faculty, and, as a result, it cut the junior economics tutorial from its undergraduate curriculum. The History Department faces a similar dearth of Americanists. Surely and quietly, Harvard’s ability to offer top-quality courses and professors—and consequently capable graduate student TFs—diminishes with each retirement. Students will just barely notice this transition when perusing the course catalog each semester.

Skeptics might say that the professorial shortages are in keeping with academic vogues, that similar alterations to the faculty’s composition have occurred for centuries. I would argue that such a paradigm shift in the faculty’s course offerings has never been this rapid or extensive outside of a curricular reform. Others might suggest that drastic cuts to the teaching staff are inevitable to balance the books, but I think it’s simply a matter of setting priorities.

In this process of establishing the budget, students are the only population on campus with solely the interests of the undergraduate experience in mind. Both the tone and content of the students’ response to budget cuts have thus reinforced stereotypes that Harvard undergraduates value almost every aspect of the student experience over academic pursuits. In deciding where our own interests lie, students have quietly conceded that the quality of course offerings is not at the top of our list of priorities.

The college community would benefit from introspection about what makes the Harvard experience a valuable one. None of us came for the luxurious housing, sunny weather, raging keggers, or satisfying meals. Though I find it hard to keep this in mind when trudging through rain to lecture at 10 a.m. with an empty stomach, the quality of the course offerings, or at the very least the cache of the professors, is what has made Harvard a great university historically: It’s what will make the Harvard brand both economically valuable and personally fulfilling for the rest of our lives.

The columnist Sydney Harris once wrote that “the primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s leisure.” In deciding what we as students care most about in the budgetary process, I hope we’ll prioritize the leisure of our future over the pleasantries of our lives today.

Benjamin P. Schwartz ’10 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House and a former Vice-Chair for the Committee on College Life. His column appears on alternate Fridays.