Too Rosy

THE APPLAUSE following Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky's final Faculty Meeting as Dean was still echoing in the halls of University Hall last week, when the sound of fresh clapping broke out-Rosovsky reaching over to give a mightly slap to Harvard's collective educational back. In his tenth and penultimate annual report released last week. Rosovsky sizes up the state of educational at Harvard. And he thinks it looks pretty good.

Infact, it probably is pretty good But is it, as Rosovsky glowingly concludes, "not just a very good college education, but an outstanding one?" Rosovsky's optimism stems from his assessment of the number of senior faculty that teach undergraduates, the availability of relatively small courses and students' assessments of their courses. On all counts, he concludes. Harvard defies the myth that it is a "large, uncaring and anomie-producing research university."

But for all his conviction, the evidence Rosovsky produces fails to back fully his enthusiastic claims. More than half of all undergraduate enrollments are in courses taught by senior faculty, the report cites-ostensibly dispelling myths that senior faculty are inaccessible and teach only graduate students. But as Rosovsky himself notes, about four-fifths of this contact comes in courses with more than 40 students. Later in the report, Rosovsky does urge senior faculty to teach a section for their lecture courses, but even this improvement would offer close faculty contact to only a handful of students in the course.

Rosovsky is also confident that larger courses are not a problem because students like them. "In general," he writes, "large courses are thought to be as rewarding as small courses." The proof is students evaluations through surveys like CUE and, he argues, the numbers themselves. "Students vote with their feet in flocking to the classrooms of our most distinguished scholars."

On this point, the evidence appears ambiguous at best. Students may well value large courses taught by senior professors as highly as small ones led by graduate students. If they have had no exposure to instruction by senior faulty in a smaller environment, students may not miss its absence. Furthermore, simply attending a large course cannot be construed as a vote for larger classes. Concentration and Core requirements must share credit for drawing out the crowds.

On the issue of the Core itself, Rosovsky's optimism again appears somewhat overblown. Rosovsky draws confidence from the statistic that close to half the Core enrollments are electives but concedes that the full impact of Core requirements will not be known until the Class of '86 graduates. Needless to say, that judgement is of little comfort to undergraduates currently struggling to combine 10 Core offerings with concentration requirements.

But the most serious shortcomings in Rosovsky's report are the issues he fails to confront altogether. Assessing the number of senior faculty who offer courses, for example, does not help determine the quality of that teaching. And nowhere, excepting his discussion of the Core, does Rosovsky address the issue of curriculum. Are professors teaching courses students want to take? These considerations would seem to have some bearing on the quality of education at Harvard.

To its credit, the report does include several helpful proposals-particularly, ways to improve teaching by graduate students. Rosovsky calls on the Faculty to give more care and supervision to the selection and training of teaching fellows, including evaluating these teachers each term and offering special English language training to those that need it.

Concrete suggestions such as these should help education here: the complacency suggested elsewhere in the report most surely will not.