Different Recollection

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Readers of The Crimson's November 15 article on the Faculty meeting on teaching (among other things) are not to be blamed--too much--if they come to the conclusion that the Faculty does not really care much for the subject. Had they other sources of information about the meeting, however, they might well have found such a conclusion less compelling.

Which is to say, I am personally struck by the discrepancy between The Crimson's account and what I saw. I'd hardly say that there was at the meeting anything like a rousing discussion of the teaching issue. But on the other hand, there certainly was not a mass exodus and what exodus there was (and many did leave this as they do most long Faculty meetings before they're over) might be attributed to several motives besides lack of interest in teaching.

Some may well have left because they couldn't be bothered to listen to the report on teaching or because they disapproved of it, but I doubt that there were many they were not. Some whom I saw leave I know to be very concerned with the quality of teaching here. Others were not teachers. Add to this the fact that we were listening, after all, to a long summary of a report we'd already been given to read and that the room was exceedingly crowded, hot, and smoky, and what seems to me remarkable is that the vast majority remained where they were for the major portion of the proceedings. Some may have nodded from time to time, but they were not unaccompanied by student representatives.

The purpose of the presentation of the report on teaching was, as Wilga M. Rivers, professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and her colleagues on the committee explained, to raise our corporate Faculty consciousness of a real problem at Harvard in preparation for implementing improvements. It was not the time or place for impassioned--and somewhat easy--speeches on the need to minister to student pedagogical needs. (As one speaker pointed out, perhaps anachronistically but nonetheless cogently, being in facor of teaching is like being in favor of motherhood.) It was, rather, the place for listening to a statement about the shortcomings of Harvard as a teaching institution and considering the various practical means the committee was suggesting for change.

What was far more important than the ebb and flow of people in the room, at least to this observer, was the fact that no one in the Faculty challenged Professor Rivers' (and her committee's) conclusions about the need for improvement, or, for that matter, the means for implementing improvement. None of the notorious anti-teaching people stood up to protest the misguided liberalism of the report, the needless expense of the teaching center it proposes, the impossibility of adhering to its recommendation that teaching be a major criterion for tenure, and so on.

In fact, the impression I left with was that the proposal for creating an environment in which teaching skills might receive unwonted (and, yes, in some quarters, unwanted) recognition at this University had actually gotten off the ground. Student interest and pressure can help keep it in flight, and may, indeed, be essential to keeping it in flight. But partial and, I'm afraid, somewhat automatic newspaper responses to what's being done to nurture this (for contemporary Harvard) rara avis, are not too helpful. Peter Dale   Allston Burr Senior Tutor