The Fall of Academics at Harvard

Disclosure: I graduated from Princeton in 2007

This article (which I skimmed) seems to use Princeton as a counterpoint to Harvard's supposed cheating culture and lax attitude towards academics. I have no idea whether students actually treat academics with more respect than their Crimson counterparts "on average".

However, I can definitely say that the kind of collaboration/copying/cheating that is described for Harvard's Econ10 course happens throughout Princeton. Whomever is being quoted from Princeton, casting it as this supposed utopia of higher learning, is either bubbling PR nonsense or is just completely out of touch with what goes on in the field.

Some random anecdotes:

I went to Pomona College, which was a very different place than the one described in the Crimson article. While I'm sure cheating did take place, I was never witness to it, nor was there any cultural expectation that it occurred. Students tended to view cheating as just screwing yourself over in the long run (paying that much money to avoid get an education is a waste of time).

Harvey Mudd College, which was right next door, had an even more aggressive stance on cheating and honorable behavior -- one which was woven into the way pretty much everything was structured over there. Students were endowed with a huge helping of trust and were expected to act responsibly (and the actual student culture seemed to actually reflect this).

Both institutions provide excellent educations. However, PC and HMC are both small and neither of them have graduate students or research faculty. The faculty that are there are very accomplished in their fields, but their focus is on teaching.

I've also been the equivalent of an RA at MIT, where things are obviously a bit different. I don't think they're as bad as at Harvard, but it's clear that for many faculty the priority is not on teaching. Combined with the large size (~200 students) of many intro classes and this can create an environment where students do not feel that their success or failure is either cared about or monitored, which I'm sure makes it easier to cheat. However, MIT's technical focus may help to alleviate this problem since all of your later classes will depend on the stuff you're supposed to be learning now, so you'll be screwed later on even if you cheat. Sadly, I don't have a ton of data here -- all I can say is that out of the population of 40 on my hall there wasn't a culture of cheating. Getting bad grades was a shocking right of passage for many first-years.

Finally, my mother taught at a large research institution for many years. There cheating in the form of copying papers was rampant and the university seemed loathe to actually punish students caught in the act. My mother eventually gave up trying. These problems were worst in the large intro classes -- once things got down to smaller (<30 students) seminars and classes, cheating became both extremely easy to identify and rare.

I thought that the quality of writing in the article was very poor. As a side note, I also found it funny that many are worried that the "prestige" of Harvard is besmirched, because the original meaning (now obsolete) of prestige was

  An illusion; a conjuring trick; a deception, an imposture.

EDIT: Even the title of the article is unintentionally funny. Because academics may also be the plural of academic (better described as an academician), the title may be taken literally.

>As professors focus on their research, and students worry about securing career opportunities, both sides become increasingly disinterested in the classroom.

This sentence is atrocious, not only because of the use of "disinterested" for "uninterested" (Bryan Garner classifies this usage as Stage 4 on the language change index, meaning that it is ubiquitous but still not quite accepted [1]), but because the meaning is ambiguous. Are the views of the students about the idea of classroom learning changing, or do the students feel apathetic inside the classrooms of professors who ignore cheating?

Another poorly written sentence:

>The roughly 30-member committee was established in the fall of 2010 and includes about eight student members.

This sentence would be fine in informal speech. In formal writing, especially in a respected newspaper such as the Crimson, it is unacceptable.

Somewhere, John Simon is muttering under his breath.[2]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-American-Usage-Garner/d... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Paradigms-Lost-Reflections-John-Simon/...

As a Harvard '04-'05 grad (two numbers meaning I left early) I think The Crimson, as per usual, misses the mark.

It is indeed partly the part of the faculty for not engaging with students (e.g. teaching) enough. But even if some of the faculty had engaged more with us as students when I was there, I might have run for my life even faster than I already did, because some of the faculty just weren't that great. In fact, some were awful. (I've written a not-very-popular book in which this is a major theme.)

Harry Lewis's attempt to protect the students from blame here is admirable, but similarly mistaken. Harvard's admissions office (which used to be run by his wife, I'm not sure if it still is) selects for the best and the brightest, but inevitable in such a selection process is a tendency to pick what William Deresiewicz calls "excellent sheep"--kids who do (or appear to do) what they're told extremely well. When you pair that with an Office of Career Services (OCS) that acts as a funnel to Wall Street--many people in my class ended up destroying the world at Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs--what do you expect to happen? You've got a huge population of smart kids whose end goal is a place in a culture where success at any cost is not just appropriate, it's encouraged.

A large portion of football team cheated on a midterm in Economics 1010a in 2003 (they took advantage of a scheduling conflict with Statistics 104 to get extra time on the exam), but no one ever got in trouble for it. My guess is that half of the people who knew about it wished that they had been so "smart."

The cheating scandal is major, but in a way, I think it's the least of Harvard's problems. They haven't even touched on the Adderall problem, or the kinds of faculty conflicts of interest highlighted in Inside Job, and they've only slightly addressed the draconian, opaque and backwards nature of the Ad Board. Even knowing about some of the important research that goes on there, in my opinion, Harvard's real problem is that its general role of late has been pretty far from a force for good, let alone truth. It's just been a rubber stamp for the broken society we read about in the headlines daily. Correcting that problem requires actual leadership which, since Larry Summers was President, has been sorely lacking.

P.S. If you think the Valley or even YC is disconnected from this dynamic, don't kid yourself. CS50 enrollment is way up because everyone thinks that they'll be the next billionaire like Mark. But CS50 is not why Bill Gates, Mark, Sheryl Sandberg (Summers's former assistant) or Nathan Blecharczyk sit atop billion-dollar companies (see http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=70). And with Jim Breyer of Accel now elected to the Harvard Corporation... You get the picture. Cheating has its rewards.

Certainly for many of MIT's professors teaching is not a priority, but you can't get tenure if you're not an adequate teacher. I also witnessed no cheating when I attended; as you note, it's self-correcting behavior for typical MIT majors.

Harvard's something of a special case in that they're notorious for not promoting from within; that is, Harvard tries to hire the very best in the world they can recruit to be full professors, and assistant, associate, whatever their lower levels are hired with the understanding Harvard's not going to grant them tenure. (I'm sure there are exceptions to this generalization, but that what I've been told is the pattern, at least in their Arts and Sciences unit).

I wouldn't expect stellar teaching to be common in such an environment, and my Harvard friends seldom if ever raved about the quality of teaching.