Letting the Good Ones Slip Through

If you have picked up the Gazette lately, you have heard about the future of Fair Harvard: After the Capital Campaign and the latest Academic Five Year Plan, our college will be able to better serve its undergraduates by enhancing its interdisciplinary programs, hiring more faculty and promoting smaller class sizes, seminars and tutorials. Your education will be improved.

But the Five Year Plan ended one year ago and the Capital Campaign is almost yesterday's news. According to Harvard, the future is here; you are only reading this for idle amusement before putting down the paper to go to your small, well-taught Core section or interdisciplinary seminar. Of course, we all know the reality behind the rhetoric. Consider Harvard's latest opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to undergraduate education: the "review" of the Environmental Science and Public Policy (ESPP) concentration and the almost unnoticed demise of its most lauded tutorial, Conservation Biology and Biodiversity.

Conservation Biology and Biodiversity is a small interdisciplinary seminar focusing on field biology and the social aspects of conservation. It is the only course at Harvard taught by two recipients of the Phi Beta Kappa award for teaching, Glenn Adelson and Dan Perlman; Adelson is the only current teacher at Harvard to have won both the Phi Beta Kappa award and the Levenson award for excellence in undergraduate education.

Students in the class meet famous environmental lawyers and government officials, talk with local farmers, reenact a court case, learn New England botany, discuss nature writing with authors, research term papers that often lead to theses and travel to Costa Rica for an in-depth look at one community's grassroots conservation efforts. The nine-year-old course has subsisted for the past five years as an ESPP tutorial, with only 25 percent of its funding provided by the university. Outside sources have supplied the rest: E.O. Wilson, the father of conservation biology and one of Harvard's most renowned professors, secured funding on his own initiative for the course over the past three years.

This year, those sources dried up, jeopardizing the continued existence of a class that actually delivers on all of Harvard's promises. ESPP, however, was given the chance to save it. An internal committee reviewed the ESPP concentration this year, providing the perfect opportunity for the concentration chairs to ask that the administration put its money at least vaguely near where its mouth is and commit funds to the course. When students and alumni learned that the class was going to be cancelled, they mounted a letter-writing campaign, appealing to the President, the Provost, the Dean of the Faculty and the ESPP committee on behalf of the class and its teachers. The letters emphasized the intimate tutorial's importance in a concentration laden with large introductory classes and, more importantly, the irreplaceability of Perlman and Adelson.

Not only did the students receive no response from the ESPP committee (Dean Knowles wrote only a perfunctory reply), but no student input at all was allowed in the "review" process--an astonishing display of administrative arrogance in a concentration that desperately needs restructuring. The concentration chairs refused to request money for the course: Conservation Biology and Biodiversity, the quintessential "small interdisciplinary seminar," will not be returning next fall; nor will two of Harvard's best teachers.

ESPP claims that the course will return next year without Adelson and Perlman; they frame this event as just another case of regular turnover on the teaching staff. But beyond the obvious differences in content and quality that different professors would bring, we doubt that anything resembling Conservation Biology and Biodiversity could be taught by anyone but Perlman and Adelson. Junior Faculty have no incentive to invest the enormous time and energy such a course requires when it takes them away from the publishing that will garner them tenure; Senior Faculty have no incentive to leave their research and spend all their time with undergraduates, both in the seminar room and the field. Adelson and Perlman are not interested in tenure--they are interested in teaching. And it is that passion and dedication that makes their class unique and irreplaceable. ESPP could have saved the class simply by listening to the students in the concentration and asking the administration to commit funds to hire these instructors in a different capacity. The ESPP committee chose not to.

Harvard has mastered the art of sending one message to alumni and another to students--that we are not qualified to evaluate a concentration in which we have spent three years, that the administration has every right to systematically ignore the requests of its constituents and that this college cares more about rules and procedures than the undergraduates who pay its bills. Your education might be improved, but it will never include the chance to learn from Glenn Adelson and Dan Perlman.

Andrea E. Johnson '98-'99 is an environmental science and public policy concentrator living off-campus. Brian A. Shillinglaw '01 is a social studies concentrator in Adams House.