The Fall of Academics at Harvard

The Fall of Academics at Harvard
thecrimson.com

> The institution and the community condones, if not promotes, academic dishonesty, emphasizing prestige over intellectual growth. Academics are no longer the priority of the students or teachers at Harvard College.

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> This prevalence of academic dishonesty is symptomatic of a pervading mentality on campus that neglects the classroom.

> Nicolaus Mills ’60, a literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College, points to a weak emphasis on undergraduate teaching as an underlying factor that enabled the scandal to take place on Harvard’s campus.

> ... As professors invest less time in the classroom—a product of pressures to establish themselves primarily as researchers—so too do teaching fellows and students.

The above attitude unfortunately has been (and will continue to be) copied by any institution hoping to place itself among prestigious names. My alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) made a huge shift in recent years (2006-) towards firing much of the "clinical faculty", which was the name reserved for faculty who did not engage in research, and instead merely taught.

Unfortunately for students, faculty who do engage in research often consider the teaching component of their careers as an afterthought (or worse, an annoyance).

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The single most important thing I learned when I was a child tutor is this: Without enthusiasm you've got nothing - zero - to work with in a student. And if they don't have it coming in you've got a non-trivial problem. You can't teach enthusiasm, it's imparted only one way.

Enthusiasm is contagious. It's part of the draw of being in a school in the first place, around so many other bright people who are willing to be there and spend the time learning. Then you get to this:

> “The modal Harvard student takes their courses as seriously as they think the instructor is taking the course,”

And it's painfully understandable that the experience will be damning for the average student, regardless of institution.

This institution has employed, as professors, various characters including Henry Kissinger and Dave Winer. This assessment is in line with the impression that gives me.

Nowadays many--most, I'd suspect--universities aren't really distinguishing themselves as the places for the building of men and women into better people and citizens of the world. Instead, they serve at the lower end as a credentialing mechanism to corporate society that someone has acceptable impulse control and willingness to embrace the system, and at the higher end as a finishing school for the finance and government elite.

Certainly at both ends some people interested in intellectually appreciating the natural and social worlds come out, but that's despite, not because of, its actual current social function. I remember the second lecture in my quantum class the professor literally reading straight out, word-for-word, from the Griffiths textbook and ran out of the classroom as soon as it was scheduled to be over. Which is an extreme example, but certainly the majority of my major classes got their value from the problem sets and textbook they forced us to work through and the people I worked with on them, not through the value-add the professor or university provides.

Why shouldn't people cheat? Our society is fine with it outside the academy (maybe not explicitly, but you can tell by how it values and punishes who do cheat). If universities exist to serve it commercially, might as well inculcate its values while it's at it.