Rule of the Unwise

The most recent meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has confirmed what many critics of higher education have long suspected: Concerning pedagogical matters at Harvard, the lunatics now run the asylum.

After somewhat heated debate, and much delay, the Faculty finally mandated that professors must offer “Q” evaluations for all their courses enrolling at least five students. The legislation’s sponsor, music professor Thomas F. Kelly, while conceding the possibly flawed premise of the evaluative escapade, however insisted that, to be fair, all graduate-student teaching fellows deserve to be judged by their students. To give greater incentive to fill out the tedious evaluation forms, compliant students will receive their grades earlier, and the “Q” site will remain open even after exams have concluded.

But these measures do not primarily ensure, however, that teaching fellows have equal opportunity to be upbraided by their unlettered pupils. Rather, the Faculty has inadvertently undermined a fundamental concept of education by casually inverting the roles of student and master.

Earning a place on the Harvard Faculty is no small achievement. The gate to this exclusive preserve remains almost ineluctably locked, even to the most promising of scholars, until he has clearly distinguished himself in his respective field. By the time an academic has ascended to such a height, he has presumably amassed an incredibly broad knowledge of his subject and, most likely, attained unrivaled expertise in his specialty—whether it be Machiavelli or early American midwifery.

As such, professors, if we trust the judgment of Harvard, are credible authorities in their fields and are qualified to pass on their vast knowledge to students, in perspicacious lectures, well-structured seminars, and carefully-selected reading lists. Such lights of the Academy ought to be entrusted with deciding what students should read and what they should learn. If not they, then who?

According to the zeitgeist of the Faculty and of this venerable page, the answer is most obvious: the students themselves.

The new “Q” regulations require professors to offer course evaluations to their students, but for what reason students ought to stand in judgment of their intellectual superiors on matters academic is both unclear and uncompelling.

Some argue that students’ constructive criticism aids the design of courses in subsequent years, and that professors are just as much “students” as their pupils and are in the classroom to learn as well.

For one, students have not had broad exposure over many semesters to the methods and types of instruction that professors variously employ. They furthermore place too much weight on short-term priorities—scant homework and easy grades—than more far-sighted goals, such as mastery of the subject matter. Students’ short, four-year time horizon clouds their vistas and consequently biases any potentially helpful advice they might proffer.

Of course, the process of education does not and should not terminate with the receipt of the sheepskin on commencement; certainly, even the most experienced of professors gain from hearing the insights of their most talented students. But to carry this logic to its extreme, and install the whim of students as the arbiter of course instruction, is manifestly imprudent.

The perspective that puts students and masters on the same intellectual plane distorts the proper order of education.

Traditionally the purpose of university is to maintain and pass on intact to rising generations the vast treasury of knowledge that our civilization has acquired over the centuries. That we have a canon and classics—although their content may be disputed—testifies to the existence, if often overlooked, of this traditional purpose. English majors read Shakespeare and not Rowling for a reason: if final curricular decisions descended to students, we should not be surprised to see radical mayhem ensue. And then even the prestige of the Harvard name might not suffice in concealing the vapid content of college education.

Hopefully, the new “Q” stipulations represent merely what they have been advertised as, leveling the playing field for graduate-student teaching fellows—and not a greater trend of student self-rule in education.





Christopher B. Lacaria ’09 is a history concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears regularly..