The Price of Learning

I rolled out of bed at about 9:37 a.m., and, after grabbing a sweatshirt and trekking across the frostbitten Yard, I strolled into the Science Center about 12 minutes late. I faced the world—and my early morning Life Sciences 1a lecture—only reluctantly on that cold December morning. As I set foot in the lecture hall, stale coffee in hand, I saw Herschel Smith Professor of Molecular Genetics Andrew W. Murray taking a stand against the chronic tardiness of students like me. I was surprised; while an unsettlingly high proportion of students arrive late (if at all) to their early morning classes, most professors grin and bear it. But not Prof. Murray.

“You’re having a little trouble getting out of bed,” he announced to the class. I yawned and rubbed my eyes. “So, on Tuesday at exactly 9:37—which is when class is supposed to start—I will take a $20 bill out of my wallet, and I will read out the number of a seat. If you’re sitting in that seat, the $20 is yours.”

My initial reaction to Murray’s new policy was disappointment, because I knew that I would never be able to make it to class in time to win the lottery. But then it occurred to me: Prof. Murray just cheapened the value of his lectures.

Professors should never feel compelled to offer financial incentives to their students in exchange for their promptness. Attending lecture should not be viewed as an unsavory job, for which students—or rather, employees—should be financially compensated for their labor. Attending class is not compulsory for this very reason—it is assumed (wrongly?) that students will come to class without having been bribed, because it is they—not their professors—who reap the benefits of lecture.

Murray’s gesture, while clearly well intentioned, makes him look desperate for an audience, as though it were the students doing him a favor in attending his lecture. This unfortunate approach compromises the essential teacher-student dynamic. If teachers feel indebted to their students for attending lecture, then students will feel a complementary sense of entitlement. Yet, let’s all put education in perspective: students pay to attain knowledge that is priceless in and of itself. This is the only financial incentive that should compel students to attend lectures.

So, if students are skipping class, and professors do not want to feel like they are lecturing into a void, they will naturally feel compelled to counteract their students’ idleness by offering incentives to get to class on time or instating penalties for skipping it. From this perspective, it is hard to blame Murray for bribing his students; instead, he rather looks like the victim.

The problem with Life Sciences 1a is that it pampers its students by posting video recordings of its lectures on the Internet within hours of their completion, thereby eliminating the need to come to class on time, if at all. Instead of resorting to dirty bribery to motivate its students to crawl out from the bed a few minutes earlier, administrators ought to cut some of these extraneous perks—perks that enable students to attend lecture electronically from their desks at their leisure, when they are feeling more alert.

I am certainly not exempt from these criticisms. Several times have I taken advantage of the Life Sciences archives so I could indulge my somnolent nature—and missing out on the potential for a $20 bill barely crosses my mind as I reach for the snooze button. If the administrators of this course want to incentivize promptness in the future, they should abolish the electronic safety net and let the natural consequences of academic negligence—namely, poor test scores—speak for themselves.

James H. O’Keefe ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Grays Hall.

James H. O’Keefe ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Grays Hall.