A Call to Students

The charges have been filed. Our nation's research universities stand accused by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching of neglecting and exploiting their undergraduates, and Harvard is listed as one of the defendants. It would seem that the claims that students here and elsewhere have been making for years have finally been vindicated.

It's too bad that this report comes at the end of the semester, when the pressures of exams and papers are likely to restrain student efforts to respond. Nevertheless, the Carnegie Report will undoubtedly encourage many of us students to intensify our demands for change in the University. Usually, these demands are brought forth in what is by now a familiar and formulaic fashion: old grievances are revived and new ones adopted, petitions are circulated, resolutions are drafted, articles are written, etc., all in the effort to lobby the administration to make significant changes to its policies.

These forms of protest are important, but they are incomplete. For one thing, institutional change at Harvard is a painfully slow process. Core reform and the creation of Ethnic Studies, when these initiatives have been taken seriously by the administration, have moved at a glacial pace. It is a general rule that students who push for changes in the curriculum, even if successful, are not likely to still be enrolled at Harvard-Radcliffe by the time those changes are made. Moreover, conventional methods of protest and external criticism of Harvard policies both seem to simply stiffen the administration's opposition to bold changes. The Carnegie Report is likely to be taken seriously by the administration and the Committee on Undergraduate Education, but it is not likely to prompt any immediate action. Harvard, for the most part, is hardly itching to innovate.

But it is not just Harvard's lack of institutional imagination that is at fault for the problems of undergraduate education; students, too, must bear their share of the blame. We students have adopted shamefully passive attitudes toward learning. We come to the College not as scholars but as consumers, judging professors on the quality of the services they provide instead of using their knowledge as a point of departure for self-motivated learning. We consider knowledge to be illegitimate unless it provides the answer to a test question, wins a grant or looks good on a transcript. And faced with the weaknesses of the undergraduate curriculum, such as a flawed Core curriculum, large class sizes, inadequate mentorship and so on, we are more likely to complain about what isn't being provided for us, if we even react at all, and less likely to take things into our own hands--to experiment with finding ways to make our education more enriching.

What we students need to do, instead of simply pressuring the administration to make changes, is to take the initiative in reforming our own education. The path has already been blazed by a number of students who have formed an alternative study group within Ec 10 to provide fellow students with access to critiques of traditional economic theory. Efforts such as these must be pursued in a wider variety of fields, not simply to provide alternatives to the ideas expressed in Harvard classes but to provide students with greater opportunities to teach and learn from each other and to experiment with new educational strategies. Moreover, these student-initiated educational reforms should be pursued within an organizational space that can provide us with resources and facilitate the exchange of ideas.

I propose that we students establish the Cambridge New College--an organization that will be devoted to encouraging students to develop and teach their own courses and that will provide them with the resources necessary to do so. The Cambridge New College will aim at developing a diverse curriculum, including courses in ethnic studies, music, political theory, economics, religion, history, community relations, ecology and whatever else students are interested in teaching and learning together. It will also provide a space in which students can experiment with methods of learning and fields of inquiry.

The Cambridge New College will meet in the Dunster JCR from 8-10 p.m. this Sunday night, where we will begin planning a fall curriculum. All students who are excited by the idea of teaching and who are ready to take ownership of their Harvard academic experience are welcome.

Joel B. Pollak '99 is a social studies and environmental science and public policy concentrator in Dunster House.