Perfecting Prefects

Earlier this week, Associate Dean of Advising Programs Monique Rinere announced the the creation of a Student Advisory Board (SAB) to advise the College on the best structure for freshman advising from upperclassmen. When the current executive board of the Prefect Program voiced concerns over the program’s future, University Hall’s statement was quickly revised to emphasize that the best elements of the Prefect Program will be kept. While we were not particularly impressed with the confusing manner in which University Hall announced the SAB, we believe that changes to freshman advising are warranted.

We strongly believe that freshmen should have formal student academic advisors in addition to faculty advising, but it would be improper to roll academic advising functions into a modified prefect program. Combining the roles of academic advisor and social coordinator will not be an improvement on the current structure, but will instead lead to superficial academic advice and will impair the progress prefects have made in building a sense of community in freshman dormitories. Rather, freshmen will be best served by a separate peer advising program in addition to a modified prefect program.

When prefects do their job, they are a font of knowledge on the House system, extracurricular activities, and College life in general. Effective prefects assist, on an informal level, in moderating small disputes between roommates and advising on blocking issues. Of course, they also constantly help over-worked undergrads relax and hang out with their fellow entryway-mates. The best prefects form friendships with their prefectees that last beyond the first year.

While there is no question that the Prefect Program is largely successful at encouraging social life within freshmen entryways, the system needs some serious changes. Most importantly, the program needs a more effective mechanism to hold prefects accountable, for the whole academic year, to the task to which they have committed. Furthermore, it is difficult for officers of the Prefect Program to keep an eye on every prefect to make sure he or she is doing his or her job. With the greater funding and additional management promised by College administrators, the new advising program should have a substantial policy to ensure prefects are performing adequately. Under the current system, the program’s officers have little leverage to ensure that students complete prefect evaluations. Simple steps such as online evaluations of prefects (with a free iPod or other giveaways for lucky participants) or random checks by officers would dramatically improve the program.

We hope that the SAB will focus on the aforementioned modifications to the Prefect Program rather than adding formal academic advising to prefects’ duties. Such a move would be ineffective, as upperclassmen are simply too busy to handle academic advising and facilitate social life at the same time. More importantly, making prefects academic advisors blurs the relationship between students and prefects. Prefects, to do their jobs effectively, need to develop casual and informal relationships with students, something that will be made difficult if prefects are expected to be formal academic advisors.

Instead, the College should establish a new peer advising program alongside a better funded and better managed Prefect Program. Freshmen would benefit invaluably from the kind of honest and practical advice upperclassmen can provide. Peer advisors could tell freshmen which Core has a lighter workload and which professor just reads from a script in lecture. Moreover, first-year students should be assigned an advisor in a broad field like social sciences, sciences, or humanities. When they enter the College, freshmen would indicate which general area they are interested in so that they would be assigned an upperclass advisor with a greater familiarity with concentrations and classes in that area. Such a system would help first-years better explore their chosen fields and would allow for a more productive freshmen year. For the new program to be successful, the College must let peer academic advisors give freshmen honest advising on courses because it would be detrimental to freshmen to give them half of the story.

An improved Prefect Program and a new peer academic advising system would dramatically improve freshman year, allowing first-years to reduce the stress of adjusting to college life and better explore academic fields. College administrators have laudably promised significant funding for the new program. Now, we hope that the SAB will recommend, and that University Hall will agree, that freshman can benefit from peer academic advising, but that it should remain separate from the social functions of a slightly modified, but already largely successful, prefect program.