The Prefect Storm

It’s only been a few weeks since Monique Rinere took office as Harvard College’s first associate dean of academic advising. On Monday, the novice administrator found herself in the middle of a hurricane when she announced that the Prefect Program would be “morphed into something else,” more than likely some form of College-funded peer advising program, before the 2006-2007 academic year. According to Rinere, the specifics of the new program are to be worked out by a to-be-formed Student Advisory Board, which will include the entire membership of the Prefect Program’s current executive board and other students selected by application. “This will be a student-directed process,” she says. “All of this will be open to student decision making.”

The announcement caught the prefect board off guard, though exactly how is beyond me. The Standing Committee on Advising and Counselling proposed a peer advising program to “replace and augment” existing programs such as the Prefect Program in its January 2006 report. And according to Rinere, the prefects had been involved in a lengthy dialogue with the College about changes to the program well before this week’s announcement. Nonetheless, in an e-mail sent early Tuesday morning that rapidly spread across the Harvard community, the program’s board informed prefects that “the Prefect Program has been disbanded effective next year, from above, and without consultation with the Prefect Board.” This newspaper took the bait, leading with a not-so-tepid headline—“College Pulls Plug on Prefects”—in last Tuesday’s issue. And before anyone could say “early retirement,” Rinere was at the center of her very first Harvard campus controversy.

Welcome aboard, Dean Rinere.

What’s upsetting about this week’s swirl of controversy is that concrete proposals for improving the quality of life of Harvard’s freshmen are being pushed out of the discussion. Instead of swallowing its collective pride and beginning the work of shaping its successor, the Prefect Program’s board seems intent on throwing a tantrum about what it feels was an inadequate amount of consultation. That’s a real shame, since huge improvements to freshman advising aren’t just attainable, they would be remarkably simple to put into place.

The first and biggest step toward improving advising at the College requires assigning incoming freshmen to upperclass houses before they arrive at Harvard and giving each freshman entryway a House affiliation. When the 2004 Curricular Review report recommended such a change to Harvard’s housing policy, it presumed that the benefits to advising from pre-assignment would consist of improved freshman access to the House tutor system—a wrong-headed argument if ever there was one. Critics rightly argued that House advisors are stretched thin across this campus and that the added load would fill the tutor system to bursting. But the 2004 report missed the point. By pre-assigning freshmen to Houses, Harvard would at last begin to take advantage of its existing geographic community building possibilities, in a way that would both improve the freshmen advising and residential experience and foster House community.

Once freshmen are pre-assigned to Houses, they should be matched with a peer academic advisor with the same residential affiliation, and with common academic interests over the summer. Consequently, landfall could be made in the advising relationship before the school year even began. The common ground that would be established by House affiliation would create an instant connection between advisor and advisee.

When freshmen arrive on campus, another upperclassman from their respective Houses should be assigned as a big brother or big sister to their entryways. This big sibling would fill the void left by the Prefect program in residential life by organizing social activities like study breaks and brunch outings and by working with the entryway’s proctor to ensure the well being of their shared charges. But unlike the Prefect Program, this big sibling would serve as a conduit for freshmen to the House they in which they would live after their freshman year. Brunches, for example, would take place in their House dining hall, and other upperclassmen from the House would be drawn upon as complementary resources. Perhaps most importantly, House affiliation would mean a built in mechanism for transforming the prefect-prefectee relationship into a long-term one; big siblings should be drawn from the sophomore and junior classes so that when freshmen move into their new Houses, they will have a well-established relationship with at least one older student in their House. This would both ease the transition for freshmen, and contribute to House community by building connections across class years.

Recreating the freshman advising structure along these lines would lead to huge structural improvements in the quality of freshmen advising and in the consistency of House life. Assigning big siblings and peer advisors based on House affiliation would also create an incentive for freshmen to “buy-in” to their residential communities from the outset. The knowledge that one’s entryway-mates will be one’s neighbors and (with any luck) friends for the rest of one’s time at Harvard would create a strong incentive for freshmen to participate in their residential communities, and to make an effort at bonding with their peer advisors.

What I propose is by no means a complete solution; For starters, I’ve completely disregarded the parallel concern of improving and expanding the pool of faculty advisors, who would and should continue to offer formal academic guidance to freshmen, to sign their study cards, and so on. There’s no question that progress must be made here as well, but a successful advising relationship with a faculty member would complement the far more important relationship between freshmen and their upperclass advisors and big siblings.

Fixing the freshman experience at Harvard is an attainable goal. By assigning incoming freshmen to Houses before they arrive on campus and by structuring advising relationships accordingly, the College can vastly improve not only the quality and “buy in” rates of freshman advising and residential experiences, but also the long-term prospects of vibrant House communities built around established relationships among incoming sophomores and House residents.

Dean Rinere and her Student Advisory Board must not tarry in implementing this three-part plan if significant improvements are to be made by next year. Indeed, with the summer just around the corner, the time is now.

Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.