Faculty To Debate Preregistration

Despite strong opposition from students, a proposal that will require Harvard undergraduates to preregister for their classes is almost certain to be adopted when it comes up for a vote later this spring, administrators and professors say.

The proposal, which is set to be discussed by the full Faculty at its meeting today, has the support of the president of the University, the dean of the Faculty and many professors.

But despite the proposal’s seemingly impending passage, some professors and many undergraduates remain unsure that preregistration will benefit students significantly enough to warrant the loss of freedom in course selection that it would bring. Roughly 1,200 students felt so strongly about the proposal that they signed their names to a petition opposing early course selection last month.

And a group of students recently presented to the Faculty Council a proposal for an alternate system that would require students to update their plans of study each semester—without requiring them to actually “preregister”—but that proposal was shot down.

Preregistration’s proponents say that preregistration would bring major advantages to undergraduates, including better advising and better prepared instructors and teaching fellows (TFs) by obtaining estimates of course enrollments several months early. But students worry that the requirement to obtain the signature of the instructor of every course they wish to add or drop during “shopping week”—preregistration’s promised liberal add/drop period—would limit their freedom to branch out and try unconventional classes.

No final decision about preregistration will be made during today’s discussion; Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz says that the proposal will most likely be voted up or down in April.

But today’s discussion will be the first opportunity for opponents of preregistration to make their case to the full Faculty.

An Initiative From the Top

Despite the advantages a preregistration system might offer, it was only through the efforts of Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby that this issue was placed on the Faculty’s agenda, administrators say.

Moving to a system of early course selection has been a goal of Kirby’s since he was first appointed dean last spring.

In an interview last May, Kirby listed the implementation of a “non-binding preregistration” system as one of his priorities, citing his concerns that the current registration system does not allow professors enough time to prepare their courses.

“It does make for a better experience to the degree you can put together a staff and plan the class,” he said last May.

Both the Registrar and director of the Core state that preregistration is not something for which they are actively pushing, although they say they are not opposed to the proposal. “This is not something that the Core office asked to happen,” Director of the Core Susan Lewis says, noting that her office is usually able to accurately predict course enrollments under the current registration system. “There are two groups of people in the institution who really would like better information, and one of them is the Faculty—they’d like to get underway in the beginning—and the graduate students, who really very much need information about where work is going to be available.”

And Registrar Arlene F. Becella says that though her office will support whatever decision the Faculty ultimately makes, she doesn’t see any major advantages to the proposed system.

“It just means that we’ll be doing this mostly earlier and we’ll have to be a little more careful about planning, organizing and coordinating our work with the course heads and department staff,” she says.

The Cases For and Against

Preregistration

The major arguments in favor of preregistration claim it will improve the Faculty’s abilities to meet the pedagogical needs of undergraduates.

Though not a “panacea to cure all our ills,” Dean of Undergraduate Education Benedict H. Gross ’71 says preregistration is worth a shot.

He says he believes a chief advantage of the proposed system will be the fact that it will allow the Faculty more time to advise students on their course selection. Requiring students to pick their classes months in advance should give their advisers a more adequate amount of time to discuss with students whether these choices are really the best for their academic careers.

“No one pretends the advising we’re doing in the first week of the term is good advising,” Gross says.

Wolcowitz expressed the same hopes that preregistration would be a way to work towards better advising at Harvard.

“We have the opportunity to do a far better job of advising when those mandated conversations happen at a different point in time,” Wolcowitz says.

But Undergraduate Council President Rohit Chopra ’04 says preregistration will not cure Harvard’s advising ills.

“The advising system’s broken for other reasons,” he said. “It’s about whether head tutors and concentration committees have the time and the staff to do advising.”

Knowing course enrollments the semester before they have to teach a course would also allow professors to present more concrete job offers to potential TFs, leading to less scrambling for jobs among graduate students and allowing them more time to prepare their course materials and teaching plans, says Gross. He also says course instructors would be able to start teaching in earnest right away without the transitory and uncertain nature that shopping period can entail.

John Girash, senior teaching consultant at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, echoes Gross’ belief that early course selection would provide graduate students with improved job security that would ultimately make them better teachers.

“There are certain courses where they have to hire people at the last minute; those TFs are thrown into the classroom without having any opportunity for pre-semester training,” Girash says. “The hope is around here that [preregistration] will at least give the opportunity for more TFs to know that they’re teaching and to take advantage of our services and our interdepartmental training.”

Currently, about 400 TFs attend the Bok Center’s fall teaching conference, and about half that amount go to the winter session.

“We don’t face shortages as much as we face problems getting our graduate students into appropriate TF positions, and they often don’t know until the last minute,” says William Mills Todd III, chair of the Department of Comparative Literature.

Additionally, administrators say early course estimates should allow professors to find adequate meeting space to accommodate all interested students, which should limit the number of courses that must be lotteried each year. Gross notes, however, that only four to five courses are lotteried each semester.

Because sophomores, juniors and seniors tend to take a wide variety of courses, it is currently difficult to predict course enrollment, Gross and Wolcowitz say.

But, in fact, many enrollment trends do remain constant.

According to the past two year’s enrollment statistics posted on the Registrar’s website, the number of undergraduates in large courses—those enrolling 75 or more students—is fairly stable.

There were 54 large courses offered in both the fall semesters of 2001 and 2002. Of those, two courses experienced absolutely no change in the number of undergraduates, and only 15 courses’ enrollments fluctuated by more than 30 undergraduates. And though several of the courses did experience extremely large enrollment changes—on the order of several hundred students—these extremely large fluctuations could frequently be explained by changes in teaching staff or some current event drawing undergraduates’ attention to the topic. For example, Afro-American Studies 10, “Introduction to Afro-American Studies,” dropped from an enrollment of 579 undergraduates to just 96 undergraduates between Fall 2001 and Fall 2002, a factor which might be explained by former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74’s departure to Princeton. And the drop-off in enrollment in Government 1540, “The American Presidency” between Fall 2001 and Fall 2002 may have been the result of the return to normalcy of student interest in the presidency after the controversial 2000 election.

And even with preregistration, some administrators are unsure that the Faculty would have accurate enough information to predict course enrollments.

“It could conceivably mean that professors have better information,” Lewis says. “For some extent it would depend on how seriously undergraduates took the exercise, how seriously they looked through the catalog when they chose their courses.”

Furthermore, Becella and others worry that because students will be allowed to preregister for up to five courses, they will—resulting in more adding and dropping than takes place under the current system and a lot of extra paperwork.

That extra paperwork is one reason why some students have suggested that preregistration—if it must be passed—be put online.

Gross says that suggestion was well taken and that the idea for web-based preregistration will be discussed at today’s meeting.

Another negative side-effect of students preregistering for more classes than they intend to take would be the overhiring of TFs.

But Wolcowitz says he isn’t worried about having too many TFs. Even if preregistration leads the FAS to overestimate the number of TFs it needs, however, he pledges that the Faculty will retain those extra TFs and put them to use reducing the size of the sections.

The main concern of students about preregistration is that they will lose the freedom that shopping period allows.

The requirement to obtain the signature of the professor for every course a student wants to add or drop is a restriction that will limit creativity in course selection, Chopra says.

“The enrollments in Sanskrit or linguistics or history of science are not letting them enjoy a subject they wouldn’t have thought about learning. You’d see...higher enrollment in the more traditional fields,” he says.

Chopra says the new “shopping period” that Gross and Kirby promise would be no shopping period at all.

“It’s like what we have after shopping period now, the same thing we have until the fifth Monday, and they’re calling that shopping period,” Chopra says. “The fact that they’re saying they’re not considering that [difference] shows that it’s not about predicting numbers, it’s about not wanting students to drift in and out of classes that first week.”

But University President Lawrence H. Summers said at a study break in Kirkland House last night that he didn’t think “the burden of getting a couple of signatures on a form is preclusive.”

“I would hope that if as I expect the proposal is adopted that students will make extensive use as they see fit of adds and drops,” Summers said.

Students have also expressed concern that the requirement to register early will force them to commit to classes without adequate information. Though professors will be encouraged to post their syllabi online prior to the preregistration deadline, the administration cannot required them to do this, Wolcowitz says.

Above all, Chopra says he worries that the Faculty is rushing into an irreversible decision.

“Once it happens,” Chopra says, “it will never go back. There’s some disorder when there’s shopping period, but getting rid of that disorder for a few lectures is not worth it.”

Faculty Reaction

Most professors are ambivalent about the preregistration proposal, explaining that for them, the new system would require the same amount of work—just a little bit earlier.

“I don’t see that it would make a great deal of difference as far as the Faculty are involved,” says Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics John Womack Jr. “As it is, it has to be done pretty early anyway.”

“I think if people are like me, it’ll be at the last minute, and they’ll learn how to cope,” says Phillips Professor of Early American History Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who notes that preregistration may make it difficult to design the elaborate course websites she typically prefers to offer her students.

Chopra says many professors have told him that they “privately oppose” the proposal.

Today’s meeting should reveal where the divisions in the Faculty on the issue of preregistration lie.

—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.