Hire Help: New Reforms to Guide TFS and Professors in Finding Each other

That TF in your Core class last semester wasn't really pulled off the street in front of the Coop, despite what you may have thought about her performance in section.

She was carefully scrutinized to determine her competence, administrators say.

Nevertheless, Harvard adminstrators acknowledge that the process of hiring teaching fellows can continue into even the fourth week of any given class.

Because of varying enrollments in some classes, professors say they are often left scrambling to find extra section leaders well after their courses have begun to meet.

So some end up hiring unprepared TFs who suffer through the semester with a section or two full of undergraduates--who themselves are suffering under their guidance.

Last week the Faculty Council adopted a new set of guidelines for appointing teaching fellows. The new guidelines were long overdue, according to the graduate students and administrators who spearheaded the effort.

The guidelines, the grad students and administrators say, will begin to structure formally a process that has plagued professors and teaching fellows, semester after semester.

Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Christoph J. Wolff presented the guidelines to the Faculty Council Wednesday.

"We generated these guidelines as a response to complaints that were made to the Graduate Student Council," Wolff said in an interview yesterday. "We came up with these guidelines hopefully to provide a first step towards creating a more logical, helpful process."

Helpful to whom? Wolff says it is graduate students who need the most help because they are the most victimized by the current process. The problem, Wolff says, is that too many graduate students, who rely on income from their teaching assignments, begin the semester not knowing whether they will be employed.

"The graduate students will benefit from this because it would enable them to begin their financial planning early," Wolff says. "Hopefully by the spring they will know whether or not they'll be section leaders in a certain course in the fall."

Wolff says that happier and more financially secure graduate students will provide undergraduates with a higher caliber of teaching.

"Graduate students would have the summer to think about their assignments and prepare to teach, so their performances would be better," Wolff predicts.

"I expect undergraduates to see the results of these guidelines immediately in the fall," Wolff adds.

But some question how beneficial the changes will be to teaching fellows and their students.

Even Wolff acknowledges that this "first step" might not take the University far enough.

"Right now we depend on enrollment patterns to predict the number of TFs that will be needed for a particular course," Wolff says. "But those numbers aren't too accurate."

While making a concerted effort to maintain the shopping period, Wolff says that a possible second step in the process of reforming teaching fellow hiring would be to make specific allocations of TFs to academic departments and individual programs.

Even with that proposed reform, the changes might not be enough, says Graduate Student Council representative Emily A. Hadded.

"We're tweaking the system rather than really changing it," she says. "But, for what they are, I guess these changes will make life easier for graduate students in that they will be less anxious about their immediate futures."

Hadded says that the dissemination of information as early as the spring is vital to the success of any reforms.

"This is hard because this kind of information has never gotten out before," she says, "the pathways weren't open for it to get out.

Professor of Sociology Theda Skocpol, who is a Faculty Council member, agrees that improving the flow of information--short of asking students to pre-register for their courses and eliminating shopping--is best way to fix the system.

The guidelines ask professors to notify graduate students of available teaching fellow positions early in the spring: to accept TF applications until may 15; to set criteria for TF appointments; and to inform graduate students of their chances of being hired for the fall semester by the beginning of the summer.

"While we tried to make sure that we weren't asking for contradictory things, we felt that this would make the whole process easier for both professors and graduate students," Skocpol says.

"Departments are invited to comply with these rational and reasonable guidelines, and I think they will," she adds, pointing out that departments like Sociology established their own standards long ago.

And if some departments don't comply?

"We're not going to police," Skocpol says, "but I think that problems [that] departments or professors might have in following the guidelines would lead to discussions with the dean or something of that nature."

Faculty Council members emphasize that the professors themselves have much to gain from complying with the guidelines.

"We want to balance the needs of professors and graduate students--graduate students want to plan more efficiently and professors don't want surprises once they've started teaching," says Kahn Associate Professor of the History of Science Anne Harrington, a Faculty Council member.

While the needs of undergraduates are not the primary concern of the reforms, undergraduates will benefit as well, Skocpol says.

"It doesn't seem to me that this will necessarily affect the undergraduates, except for the fact that they'll have the right TFs teaching the right courses," Skocpol says.

But the guidelines do draw accolades from Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57. "They appeared to met to be good guidelines that made sense to adopt," he says.

But while Secretary to the Faculty John B. Fox Jr. '59 says the formerly "laissez-faire" market for TFs appears to be shaping up, he also concedes there is much work left to be done.

Fox says the problem is created by the fact that Harvard allows students and professors to wait until the last possible minute to choose which courses they will take and which courses they will teach.

The ultimate solution is, of course, pre-registration, Fox says. He says that while he expects few students to support the idea, the idea is not necessarily dead.

Perhaps his warning has already been heeded. "Pre-registration would be ideal for everyone involved--professors, graduate students and undergraduates," says Graduate Student Council President Carlos A. Lopez.

"These new guidelines, while helping to ease the financial anxiety and uncertainty of graduate students, and only a temporary solution," Lopez says. "The reality is that there isn't enough teaching to go around."

U.C. Near to Closing `Giant' Concert Deal

After two earlier failures, Undergraduate Council appears close to bringing a live concert to campus.

Campus life committee member John A. Mann '92-'94 said this week that the alternative group "They Might Be Giants" had signed a contract to come to campus for an April 28 performance.

"They Might Be Giants" is known for songs such as "Istanbul" and "Particle Man." The value of the contract is $10,000.

Deals struck earlier in the year to bring "Blind Melon" and "Digable Planets" fell through. The contract for "They Might Be Giants" must be approved by the council in a vote scheduled to occur on February 13.

"It doesn't look like it will fall through," Mann said. "It looks pretty much definite."

`History 10b' Survey Changes Focus to Sex

Students who shopped "History 10b: Western Societies, Politics, and Cultures: From 1650 to the Present" may have expected something like what the course book promised:

"Second half of a survey of European history from the first cities and empires to modern times. Also treats some major aspects of the history of the Americas insofar as they from part of overarching Western developments. Topics treated, comparatively, include monarchs and estates in the era of estate formations; the Enlightenment and age of revolutions; liberalism and nation building; imperialism and the world wars; cultural and social change; individualism, gender, and race."

Instead, Goelet Professor of French History Patrice L. Higonnet '58 lectured on gender roles and sexuality and showed explicit slides of historical drawings of genitalia in class.

"It wasn't what I expected at all," said Polly C. Langendorf '97.

Higonnet said he wants to move away from traditional methods of teaching history.

"I meant for the lecture to be surprising," Higgonet said. "My idea was not to shock, my ideas was to make people understand that their lives, and historical lives, are constantly being reinterpreted.

Peres Speaks About Peace Process, Security

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres spoke to a crowd about 1,000 at Alumni Hall on Thursday.

Peres, who answered questions instead of delivering a prepared speech, mixed one-liners with serious answers about the possibilities for a Palestinian state.

Throughout, Peres emphasized that his priorities were peace and security. He also said Palestinians should not be dominated by Israel.

"The Jewish history is 4,000 years old," Peres said. "Never our history did we dominate another country."

"We prefer to be free from domination, both as dominating and dominated," he added. "We do not want to elect [the Palestinians'] leaders. We do not want to enforce our will upon them."

Provost Forms Panel On Tests With Humans

In the wake of news reports about Harvard involvement in experiments using radiation on human subjects, Provost Jerry R. Green this week named a panel of Harvard officials and experts to look into the testing done between the 1940s and the 1970s.

The panel will pay close attention to the work of late Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Clemens E. Bend, who conducted experiments with radiation on retarded children at the Fernald State School in Waltham, Mass.

Fernald was an active research and lecture center for Harvard students and professors from the Medical School and the School of Public Health, according to a 1959 report disclosed this week.

The panel will also cull Benda's collected papers, which are stored at Harvard's Countway Medical Library. Judith Messerle, Countway's head librarian, says the library is currently hiring an independent archivist to assist the investigation and separate out patient records from the 27 boxes of files.

Some of Benda's records will be sent to Fernald to aid the state Department of Mental Retardation in its investigation. But University officials are still unable to say whether any files have yet left Cambridge.

Heymann Quits Justice; To Return as Law Prof

Ames Professor of Law Philip B. Heymann has resigned his post as U.S. Deputy Attorney General. He will return to the faculty at the Law School.

Hermann took a leave of absence for the 1993-94 academic year. He said his resignation was prompted by a lack of "chemistry" between himself and Attorney General Janet Reno.

"We don't have any great policy differences, there is no precipitating case or event," Heymann told the New York Times. "The fact of the matter is our chemistry isn't good. We don't work as well together as we should, and that's the conclusion we've both come to."

U.S. Department of Defense Jamie S. Gorelick '72, a Law School Graduate, has been nominated to replace Heymann.