Advising May Face Overhaul

Offer Harvard advisers a penny for their thoughts on the advising system, and they’ll tell you that it doesn’t work.

“We must overhaul the system by which students are, and more often, are not, given academic advice by faculty,” Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby wrote in the “mission statement” for Harvard’s ongoing curricular review.

One fifth of students in a December Crimson survey identified advising as the most important issue for the curricular review to address, second only to the Core and general education.

But some of the curricular changes the leaders of the review are pushing could make the advising system even worse.

As a committee reviewing concentration choice prepares to recommend delaying that decision until the middle of sophomore year, members of the committee charged with saving the College’s already beleaguered advising system are scrambling to figure out what they will do with the new crowd of uncertain sophomores.

The committee could propose the creation of a centralized advising center that would be geared toward students whose concentrations are undeclared. The Freshman Dean’s Office (FDO) may be phased out of its role directing first-year academic advising.

But faculty worry that the same problems plaguing the current advising system—including difficulties getting students to come see their advisers—would hurt the center. And some department officials are skeptical that professional advisers could grasp the in and outs of the concentrations.

Also on the table are models based upon the advising system at Princeton and at Yale (see story, page 6), which would shift advising to rely more on faculty and resident tutors while phasing out first-year proctors. But these ideas are widely seen as placing infeasible burdens on the resident tutors and faculty—many of whom may be reluctant advisers in the first place.

As the recommendations of the Working Group on Students’ Overall Academic Experience become public at the end of the month, there is no certainty that their proposals will make a positive difference to students in search of advising.

AN AILING SYSTEM

Faculty and students widely criticize first-year advising—which culminates in the choice of concentration—as the area most in need of overhaul.

Victoria L. Sprow ’06, who serves on the working group examining advising, says her committee found first-year advising to be inconsistent. Under the system, most first-years are advised academically by the dorm proctors, but others are assigned an adviser from a pool of administrative staff from around the College and a small number of faculty volunteers.

“As far as freshman advising goes, some students had their advisers living in the same dorm with them, which was great, but some did not,” Sprow writes in an e-mail. “Also, some students felt like their advisers were not too familiar with the Harvard academic system. And, many advisers currently also act in a disciplinary role, which can cause problems.”

Undergraduate Council president Matthew W. Mahan ’05 cites unknowledgeable proctors as a major impediment to first-years’ exploring the curriculum and course catalogue.

“It’s unreasonable that we have first-years who come in super-excited and super-confused, and their proctor who doesn’t know enough about the curriculum. I know so many people who are dissatisfied with their early-on advising,” Mahan says.

Ryan D. Hughes ’06 says he took Government 1540, “The American Presidency,” as a first-year after being told by his proctor that he could petition to have it count as a Core.

“I have this poignant memory of calling the Core office and asking them if I could use ‘The American Presidency’ as my Core for social analysis. They were like, ‘I don’t know who gave you advice, or what you’re thinking about, but no, no chance in hell,’” he says.

Professor of the Practice of Indo-Muslim Languages and Culture Ali S. Asani, the acting director of undergraduate studies for Sanskrit languages and civilizations, says he thinks proctors are not in the position to be ideal advisers. “The proctors do get training, but they may have a whole entryway of people to advise and it’s just impossible for them to be able to give the same quality of advising as somebody who just has two advisees, in the sense of the workload,” he says.

The head of the FDO—which is in charge of hiring proctors and is responsible for first-year advising—says that this year’s mid-year survey found that some people do not even use their advisers.

“Advising by this time of year should be able to help students to put pieces together,” Dean of Freshmen Elizabeth Studley Nathans says.

But she notes that the first-year adviser’s job—providing general advising on questions that run the gamut of the curriculum—“is not quite as simple as people sometimes feel.”

Nevertheless, says Senior Lecturer on History and Literature Steven H. Biel, the director of studies for the history and literature program, “I’d be surprised if the FDO said everything is hunky-dory.”

And rather than working within the FDO and the current proctor structure to solve the problem, the curricular review report may recommend a fundamental shift away from proctor-based advising.

Nathans says that the FDO has not been a major part of discussions on changing first-year advising. She says she was only consulted once, briefly, by Lisa L. Martin, the co-chair of the Working Group on Overall Academic Experience that’s looking at advising. Martin, the Dillon professor of international affairs, declined comment for this story.

Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71, who co-chairs the curricular review steering committee, says that a new advising structure “would mean a lot for the FDO.”

“They are now in charge of all advising for freshmen. They are in charge of proctors, and that will probably not change. But whether they will do academic advising remains to be seen.”

Nathans declined comment on the possibility of removing academic advising from the FDO.

“The FDO has not been a party to any such discussions,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Gross notes that a likely proposal of delaying concentration choice hinges on improving the first-year system.

“I think we are looking for a system that can deliver academic advising by some other route,” he says. “If we have better freshman academic advising, people may be more sympathetic to delaying concentration choice.”

CONCENTRATION CHOICE

In an interview this month on the curricular review, Kirby says that pushing back concentration choice—which will be recommended to the Faculty in May—will allow students to explore more than one area of study in depth.

But whether the Faculty accept pushing the decision back to the middle of the sophomore year will depend in part on whether they have confidence in a revised plan for general advising that would then have to make room for first-semester sophomores in addition to first-years.

“We don’t do a good enough job in freshman advising. I worry if we push back advising and don’t improve advising especially in the first and second year, then we will make the advising system worse,” says Cabot Professor of Biology Richard M. Losick, who is head tutor for biochemical sciences and sits on the curricular review steering committee. “I’m not religiously opposed to pushing back concentration choice per se, but if we do that we have to have a better advising system.”

Professors in the science departments in particular worry that students who may not receive concentration advising before the second semester of sophomore year will have trouble fulfilling departmental requirements, according to Gross.

“In the sciences, the concern about pushing back concentrations is that students won’t have had enough necessary background,” he says.

Gregory C. Tucci, the assistant director of undergraduate studies in chemistry, says he is worried that without proper advising, students who decide to join departments during sophomore year may have missed the chance to take prerequisite courses.

Humanities faculty also have qualms about extending the current non-concentration advising apparatus, says Peter Machinist, the acting head tutor for near eastern languages and civilizations.

“I went to a meeting of advisors a couple of weeks ago. Several of us from different quarters had a little hesitation about delaying [concentration declaration] too much because if you start the requirement too late, you’re not going to be able to do anything serious,” says Machinist, the Hancock professor of Hebrew and other Oriental languages. “In our field, you can’t start a language in your junior year.”

But finding the source for the additional advising may be difficult. The departments currently have staffs to deal with in-concentration advising, but have minimal resources to handle non-concentrators.

Anya E. Bernstein, director of studies for social studies, says the program might need to create a staff to advise non-concentrators, a task for which it is now unprepared.

“We would have to focus on helping students to figure out what they want to do to a greater extent even before they’ve determined that they definitely want to be a social studies concentrator,” Bernstein says. “Right now, we don’t really have the infrastructure to do a lot of that. We have the assistant director who will meet with students, but he’s one person.”

Lindsley Professor of Psychology Stephen M. Kosslyn, the head tutor in psychology, suggests that the department hire staffers to keep track of concentration requirements while asking faculty to advise students as academic mentors.

“I’m not sure I trust the faculty to be on top of all the requirements because it actually requires paying attention,” Kosslyn says. “The requirements change. The ideal from my point of view would be to have a full-time professional who is really an expert, and his job is to track requirements.”

Tucci points out that without strong advising for undeclared sophomores, the increased academic freedom that would accompany delaying the concentration choice may backfire.

“If you push back the concentration choice, and students aren’t getting good advising, and they’re just taking courses willy-nilly, they’re going to lose out,” Tucci says.

A NEW HOME

The leaders of the curricular review are aware of the impending advising crisis.

In the report later this month, they may propose the creation of a centralized advising center to overcome the gap in quality advising that the concentration shift would bring.

“An advising center is certainly a possibility, as a building or a collection of a lot of staffed advisers,” Gross says.

Biel says he thinks the advising center could provide a sense of continuity for sophomores as they move from the first-year advising system to the House.

“We are thinking about a more centralized form of pre-concentration advising,” Gross says. “We have to treat pre-concentration advising more seriously, as a job, and not just as an add-on.”

But although the advising center is under serious consideration by Gross and other leaders of the curricular review, several head tutors say such a center was unlikely to have knowledgeable staff and would probably lead to an impersonal experience for students.

Tucci says that “it would be very bad if someone is giving chemistry advice and that person is not a chemist,” but added that even if the center had advisers who were trained in different disciplines, its advice might be better left to the departments.

“For concentration advising, you need to talk to somebody who knows the field and knows the course work very well...I would be slightly suspicious of if there was an adviser out there who was not a chemist, but who would be a full-time, professional advisor in this advising center,” he says.

“We’re always talking about getting more people in the departments,” he adds. “At least if the advising is in the departments, we at least know that people are getting to the departments to get some advice. If the advising is in the advising center, we don’t know that students are coming to the departments.”

Thayer proctor David D. Kim, a second-year graduate student, says he believes the advising center is likely to be impersonal.

“I wonder whether that is really that much more effective, considering the time and commitment and money that would need to go into that kind of advising,” Kim says. “The proctor has the advantage of seeing students on a daily basis and can take his personal interactions with students into consideration. If a student simply goes to an advising center, that holistic element of the advising experience is missing. You would simply be meeting with that adviser for 30 minutes two or three times a year, and that would be it.”

Sharon R. Krause, head tutor of the government department, points out that given what she says is a lack of interest in the present advising system, she questions whether students would use an advising center.

She says that with the exception of study card signing week, tutorial office advisers are “not very busy.”

“Students aren’t coming in very frequently to talk to their adviser. That’s why I’d say that our biggest objective at the present time is to try to find ways to get students to come in to use the advising resources that we have,” says Krause, an assistant professor of government. “My sense is that it’s not that we have too few advising resources. It’s not that we need more advisers. It’s that we need to find ways to convince students to use the resources that we have.”

MATCHMAKING

To combat concerns that an advising center would be impersonal, some faculty have suggested that the current system under which a minority of first-years is advised by non-residential faculty members with similar academic interests should be expanded.

Losick points out that Princeton has already established such a system for all its approximately 1,160 first-year students.

“I’ve heard good things about Princeton because freshmen are assigned to faculty in broad areas according to their provisional interests they indicate in the summer before freshman year,” Losick says.

Faculty such as Asani who have served as first-year advisers generally sing the praises of the setup.

“You have a match that takes place between incoming students and faculty that’s the ideal. In a sense, it helps the transition from freshman year to concentration because you’ve worked with a faculty member who knows the system well and is able to give broad, intellectual advice on how to approach things,” Asani says.

Liora R. Halperin ’05, who had Asani as her first-year adviser, says that based upon her own positive experience, she feels all first-years should have non-residential advisers.

“I was really lucky in my freshman year because I had a non-residential adviser who was in the concentration I was interested in. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. Unfortunately, everyone else I knew had proctors that knew nothing about the undergraduate curriculum,” she says.

But Susan C. Merenda ’07, who is advised by a professor involved in theatre, says that because she already knew that she wanted to study theatre entering Harvard, she might have been just as happy with her Weld proctor as a sole adviser.

Regardless of whether faculty advisers would be effective, Nathans points out that Harvard simply doesn’t have enough faculty to follow the Princeton model.

“We’d like to do that,” Nathans says. “[But] most members of the faculty advise only two or three students. There are approximately 1,600 students in the freshman class.”

Harvard would need a “major cultural change that is probably never going to occur” to be able to match up all students with faculty, she says.

Biel, who is also a non-residential first-year adviser, shares Nathans’ concerns.

“Harvard faculty members are stretched very thin with all sorts of commitments...I have at most three freshman advisees every year. I don’t know how it would shake out if every faculty member had a certain number of advisees,” he says. “If the resources of the University are spread too thin, then you’re not going to have those close advising relationships.”

Even considering that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is committed to expanding its rank to 700 professors, an increase of 10 percent over the next decade, administrators seem skeptical that any plan could attract a critical mass of faculty advisers.

“I don’t see a groundswell of professors signing up to advise students,” Gross says, adding that while Nathans has made “a valiant effort” to recruit these professors, only a small number agree to take on advising roles.

Nathans says there are around 100 teaching faculty—including about 40 on the tenure track—who serve as first-year advisers.

Tucci says faculty members might also prove unable to provide the general advising now doled out by proctors and advisers trained by FDO.

“They’re also trained in things like handling a student who comes in here interested in astronomy, physics and math, but who has a secondary interest in VES. That freshman adviser should be trained enough to say, ‘Let’s construct a program so that you can explore some of the science but still have that VES,’” says Tucci, who has served as a first-year adviser.

He says that students who know they are interested in particular fields upon entering Harvard should make sure to get more broad exposure.

“I would want to make sure that those freshmen are still in contact with a general adviser to make sure that they’re seeing the whole scope of what’s here at Harvard and not just considering themselves chemists from day one,” he says.

But some head tutors’ objection to the advising center—that there is no evidence that students would use new resources—seems also to apply to proposals that would simply assign more faculty advisers to first-years.

“Some students would like more advising, but some faculty feel underused,” Professor of History Joyce E. Chaplin, the head tutor in history, writes in an e-mail. “The latter indicates the existence of a not-inconsiderable population of students who would really rather not have the faculty bug them.”

Regardless of whether the curricular review succeeds in encouraging faculty to spend more time in advising students—or students in taking advantage of advising resources—proposals like an advising center or a move away from proctor-based advising are far from implementation.

“The time line is the next couple of years,” Gross says. “We are not in any position right now to change advising.”

—Staff writer Alan J. Tabak can be reached at tabak@fas.harvard.edu.