Educators on Panel Talk Teaching, Research

The pomp and circumstance of Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers’ Friday inauguration ceremony followed a morning of substantive academic discussion, as the University held a series of faculty symposia, including one on a topic Summers has been pushing since his appointment—undergraduate education.

The symposium at Lowell Lecture Hall addressed some of the greatest challenges currently facing this nation’s university educators and administrators. The group of panelists included some of higher education’s most prominent names, including top officials from Duke and Princeton Universities.

Combating grade inflation, improving information technology and dealing with the commercialization of education are all becoming top priorities, the panelists agreed.

Panelists said that at research universities, where faculty are hired not only to educate student but to produce their own original studies, engaging students in the learning process can be a real challenge.

“We have to make sure good researchers are also good teachers,” said new Princeton Provost Amy Gutmann, herself once a candidate for the Harvard job.

Increasing student involvement in faculty research projects, creating more awards recognizing faculty members who combine research and teaching particularly well and providing more support for faculty members so that they have more time to focus on teaching may be possible solutions, panelists said.

The speakers also stressed the need to increase the number of freshmen seminars and similar small classes taught by tenured faculty—something that Harvard has been pushing in recent months.

“We need to challenge our students, unsettle them...open their eyes and their minds and stretch their horizons,” Duke University President Nannerl O. Keohane said. “That, after all, is the business we’re in.”

The Business Of Education

Education as a business was also a concern.

Richard P. Chait, professor of higher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said students and parents have come to see education as a consumer product.

He said studies show that 57 percent of undergraduates today believe increased earning power to be the chief benefit of a college education—an increase of 11 percent since the 1970s, when students felt learning to get along with others and gaining a broad liberal arts education were more pressing reasons to go to college.

As a result, Chait said, students and their parents have a greater demand for better grades and honors degrees—two criteria which they see as essential for landing high-paying jobs. Since the 1960s, he said, that has resulted in grade inflation.

When an audience member asked about Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 and his crusade against what he sees as a rampant inflation problem, Dean for Undergraduate Education Susan G. Pedersen said it is not as much of a problem as the press has made it out to be.

“One of the funny things is that because of media attention, something that seemed like a non-issue to me got blown up,” she said.

She said, however, the faculty does need to discuss grading policy.

Gutmann said one way to combat the consumerization of education is to increase financial aid opportunities for students.

“If education is a consumer good, then raffle it off the the highest bidders,” Gutmann said.

But if it is not, Gutmann said, then universities must make it available to all qualified students.

Chait said there was not enough information available for informed discussion. Faculty members do not do enough research on teaching, he said.

“What’s of most interest is how little data faculty generate on faculty,” he said.

“The moment we get complacent is the moment we’re in decline,” Gutmann said.

—Staff writer Kate L. Rakoczy can be reached at rakoczy@fas.harvard.edu.