The Other Side of the Podium

I cannot claim to speak for the Harvard faculty, and yet the views presented here are clearly not only my own. Over several years now, I have compared notes with many of my fellow teachers about the Harvard tradition of course-shopping, and I have heard many different impressions about it. In fact, almost every-one--including students--seems to have a distinct view on the matter. I will try to convey here a fairly representative range of faculty views.

If there is a problem at all, it stems from something that is basically good about Harvard: of all universities that I know, it offers students the greatest variety of courses. Moreover, very many of these courses have small enrollments, so that a student has the valuable opportunity of working all the more closely with the teacher.

Harvard's pre-eminence in course-offerings inevitably causes anxieties. Am I taking the course that is right for me? The greater the choice, it seems, the higher the anxiety. During the brief season of course-shopping, when so many choices have to be made, the anguish level reaches high noon, for students and teachers alike.

We may draw here a contrast with those kinds of life-situations where people are given not much choice. How about arranged marriages? There may be more dissatisfaction with the lack of options but at least, some would argue, young people have less anxiety about personal responsibility for a life-choice. Well, I would prefer to see students be anxious--but able to choose.

The anxiety about choice extends to professors as well. Countless times I have anguished over the course-suggestions that I give to students. And I don't mean only concentrators in my field of Classics. When I was Master at Currier House, for example, I kept giving out a plethora of informal advice to hundreds of students, some of whom I knew well or some not so well, and the vast majority of them were of course not in my field. And I think I was pretty good at it, since my advice was based on a fundamental humanistic principle: these people study at Harvard because they want the best liberal education.

Harvard's offerings, I am convinced, have something just right for everyone's liberal education. The anxiety is, will students find what is just right, and can I as a teacher help them find it? Equally important, is there just one right choice, or are there many right choices, for each student's education? The best answer, I think, is that there are many right choices. But the problem is, there are also many wrong ones as well, and they are being made all the time.

Most of my advice over the years has been on the marks, as I think back, but there have been many missed opportunities, and some outright mistakes. Sometimes I would think of just the right course for a student when it was too late: you see a familiar face at, say, Commencement, and suddenly it comes to your head that you have just the right idea about that one special course that this student has to take. In general, my worry is that too many students at Harvard miss too many opportunities for achieving the best possible liberal education. There can never be such a thing as too much course-advising at Harvard, given our university's prodigious intellectual diversity.

A major difficulty, of course, is a pervasively corrosive attitude that is typical of our times. In our Iron Age, the concept of liberal education tends to be no longer even mentioned, let alone understood. Once this concept is lost, education becomes a mere commodity, to be evaluated in material terms. Then the word shopping in the expression shopping period becomes an ominous sign of unmitigated materialism, as if all that mattered were the usefulness of education for one's immediate or ultimate material well-being.

If it comes down to that, then people can get badly hurt. It is primarily the students who are vulnerable, if they make choices merely on the basis of material advantage. Will I get a good grade? Will this help my career? These are legitimate academic concerns, but they become debased if there is no higher principle at work in the making of course choices.

The people who do the teaching can also get hurt, though not nearly so badly. I am talking not about the potential for wounded egos and general feelings of rejection, as when a teacher sees students walking out in the middle of a sentence (I try to imagine what goes through the mind and heart of a street musician). I am talking rather about the disruption of teaching strategy, as for example those instances where countless hours of course-planning can be wrecked by an unexpected turnout in patterns of enrollment.

The problem is especially serious in seasonally recurring courses with large enrollments in the Core Program. Since the Core is relatively unaffected by departmental faculty advising, the ebb and flow of student enrollments is particularly difficult to predict. I can speak from experience, having taught a Core course ("The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization") since the late 1970s. Over the years I have worked closely with the administrators of the Core, who are very experienced and able academics, but even our combined efforts cannot provide a fail-safe yearly calculus for enrollments. If we underestimate the numbers of students, then I have to go out and find additional teaching help at the last minute--which inhibits the kind of careful planning that I need for the course. If we overestimate the numbers of students, then I have to let go of some key members of the team that I have laboriously assembled for months in advance, and I even have to cut back on key components of the teaching strategy--as I had to do this year in the case of projected computer, film, and theater sections in my course. Much as I love the course that I teach, I feel frustrated enough about the teaching constraints caused by the unpredictability of course-enrollments that I am ready not to offer it any more.

An important part of planning a large course is setting up the teaching staff and getting them prepared. The ominous uncertainties of course-enrollments in Core courses prevents the professor from giving all the necessary commitments to the teaching staff. Worse still, the professor may fail to get commitments from talented teachers who cannot be hired, if they can be hired at all, until late September, when the results of shopping period finally emerge.

The question of course-enrollments in Core courses is a special problem that may best be addressed by thinking up a new way of shopping for these kinds of courses. I have become very sympathetic to the idea of pre-registration, limited to the Core Program. Pre-registration would enable the Core Program to help teachers like me plan their Core courses effectively--and it would help students and their advisors (administrators, faculty, and peer groups) to plan the students' liberal education.

This is not an argument for no choice, no shopping. It is an argument for premeditated choice and early shopping--something like early admissions--in the students' plans for constructing their own personalized education within the Core Curriculum.

Gregory Nagy is Jones professor of classical Greek literature and professor of comparative literature.