Get It Together
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.
An Unnecessary Stipend
Facing criticism for the weakness of Harvard College’s advising system, University Hall established the Peer Advising Fellows four years ago to replace the perpetually unpopular Prefect program. Believing that a lack of commitment by prefects partially doomed the freshman-mentoring program, the administration decided to energize advisors by paying the new PAFs an annual stipend of $1,000 for their efforts. Four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, the fundamental miscalculation to pay the Fellows still goes unchallenged. But to establish a genuine culture of peer-based mentorship and to save precious resources in the middle of a budget crunch, University Hall should do now what it should have done at the program’s inception: let PAFs advise for free.
The decision to pay these students in the first place was rooted in flawed logic. After long discussions with the program’s director, it became clear to me that the Advising Programs Office believed paying PAFs made them take the position more seriously; administrators thought that if Fellows viewed the mentorship as a job, they would be more likely to log the necessary hours. University Hall also reasoned that, by paying PAFs, students who would otherwise seek part-time employment could instead apply to the program.
The Status Quad
Prior to the randomization of housing assignments, residential communities were regrettably homogeneous, though consequently vibrant: Your house largely defined who you were on campus, especially when drinking rules were lax and final clubs a marginal part of campus culture. When the lottery system finally began in 1996, the College failed to address the weakening effects on house spirit that randomly sorting an increasingly (and thankfully) dissimilar student body would induce. It was and still is unrealistic to expect that a dormitory assigned through lottery can become the most meaningful community in a majority of students’ lives, regardless of how many pool tables you put in a JCR. So, while last April’s Report on Housing Renovation contained insightful and conscientious recommendations, I propose one more suggestion that would fundamentally restructure how we think about residential life at Harvard: House all the sophomores in the Quad.
University Hall’s first reaction is usually less than optimistic when it comes to new ideas, so it is worthwhile to address some of the natural counterarguments to the proposal. I realize that turning the Quad into sophomore housing would fundamentally alter house life on Linnaean Street, and I would argue that this change is for the better. The Quad would transform, certainly, but the vibrant sense of community that has been its hallmark would survive and flourish with a new and enthusiastic network of sophomores each year. And for those really concerned about the future of the Quad houses, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but its life expectancy is short anyway: Once construction in Allston is complete, the College plans to stop housing undergraduates noth of Cambridge Common.