College Embraces Magic of Numbers

Just months after he became dean of Harvard College, Benedict H. Gross ’71 published an innovative mathematics textbook entitled “The Magic of Numbers.”

The College administration’s recent initiatives suggest that it has taken Gross’s title to heart.

The year before Gross took charge, Harvard ranked fifth from last on a 2002 student-satisfaction survey of 31 elite institutions that was leaked to the Boston Globe last spring. Those results, along with other survey data, have steered the College’s direction over the past two-and-a-half years.

Top administrators have consistently sought to raise students’ satisfaction with their overall undergraduate experience, targeting areas that student data have identified as problematic. The 2002 survey gave Harvard particularly low marks in social life, quality of advising, and faculty availability.

But Gross’s predecessor and other former College administrators said they have not been enchanted by the current emphasis on following the numbers. Those critics fear that satisfying students might sometimes be different from educating them.

During Gross’s two-and-a-half years at the helm, the administration has taken large steps to improve undergraduate social life. Progress in academic reform, however, has come slowly as the Curricular Review—which Gross co-chairs—continues without a Faculty vote on its recommendations after three-and-a-half years.

FOLLOW THE NUMBERS

Gross and his senior staff use survey results to “inform our priorities,” he wrote in an e-mail Friday. And, as he indicated in an interview last month, the College has tried to improve the areas that student surveys have shown need work.

The 2002 survey numbers indicated high student satisfaction with extracurricular activities and residential life.

“Basically, we’re in good shape there,” Gross said.

“What comes out of the surveys is that students are dissatisfied with their contact with the Faculty, and they’re profoundly dissatisfied with advising,” Gross added. “They’re also dissatisfied with social life.”

The initiatives pursued by top College administrators over the past two-and-a-half years reflect the weight placed on the student survey numbers.

Since 2003, the College has created an associate deanship for advising and continued an expansion of the Freshman Seminar Program that had begun under the previous administration.

The current administration has also spearheaded efforts to expand student space, including the upcoming construction of the Loker Pub, the renovation of Hilles, and the reconstruction of freshman dorm basements.

A $6 million grant from the Office of the President, in addition to another Mass. Hall grant for the position of campus life fellow to plan community events, has supported recent efforts to build an undergraduate community.

“One thing I learned an awful lot from Dean O’Brien was to look at actual surveys and data,” said Gross, who assumed the College’s top post in 2003 and hired O’Brien, former dean of the Simmons College of Management and graduate of Harvard Business School, a year later. He said at the time that the tasks of his new job—presiding over the two main College domains previously headed by two deans—had left him feeling “overwhelmed.”

One former Harvard administrator said that the emphasis on raising the numbers came from the President’s Office.

“It was a mandate from the top,” said the former administrator, who did not want to be named because of the sensitivity of the situation. The source added that outgoing University President Lawrence H. Summers, “more than any dean,” encouraged “a competitiveness to get Harvard up in the scores.”

Gross did not comment whether Summers specifically asked for the administration to boost undergraduate satisfaction scores, but he did write in an e-mail that he was “shocked” when he first saw the low numbers, while serving in his previous post as dean for undergraduate education.

Summers said in an interview that he believes the College administration has long needed to study and respond to student data.

“I think their determination to measure student satisfaction concretely and regularly and work to increase it is a ...huge and overdue step forward for the College,” Summers said.

But some former administrators expressed concern with the numbers-driven priorities that now guide the College.

Former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68, who was forced from his post three years ago and is publishing a book called “Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education,” wrote in an e-mail that he questions whether emphasizing student satisfaction is the best way to run a College.

Quoting a fellow academic from outside Harvard, Lewis wrote, “Part of a university’s responsibility may be to satisfy its students. But it is also a university’s responsibility to educate those individuals whom it is certifying as educated. Unfortunately, those goals are often in conflict.”

Former Associate Dean for Academic Programs Elizabeth Doherty, who held several posts within the College and Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) before leaving for Brown early last year, wrote in an e-mail that she chose to move from Cambridge to Providence primarily because of the attractions of the new post. But she added that she perceived “a growing tendency to denigrate the work of the faculty and to describe education as a ‘product’” in the College. “All of this seemed to me to be antithetical to the central values of an academic community.”

Gross countered those assertions.

“I see students as participants in the work of the University, not as consumers,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I think their ideas—on the curriculum, on advising, on extracurricular life—are well worth listening to.”

Student surveys are not unique to Gross’s administration. Lewis said that the College had regularly administered student surveys long before he became dean in 1995.

Former administrators who were at Harvard during Lewis’ tenure offered different pictures of how much emphasis his administration placed on data.

Former Dean of Freshmen Elizabeth Studley Nathans, who was forced from her post last year, wrote in an e-mail that, under Lewis, student-satisfaction surveys “were taken very seriously indeed.”

“And they sparked countless initiatives—though initiatives less focused on immediate and public ‘gratification’ or ‘quick-fixes’ than on carefully crafted structural and policy changes which seemed to promise significant long-term benefit to the College and its students.”

But according to the former Harvard administrator who requested anonymity, “under Dean Lewis, even if people looked at the data, they didn’t worry about it.”

Lewis wrote that his administration “found the written comments especially helpful” in the annually administered surveys.

AN ACADEMIC FOCUS?

In March 2003, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby announced a dramatic restructuring of the College administration, forcing out Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 and tapping Gross to lead Harvard’s consolidated undergraduate branch.

The new structure merged the academic and social sides of the College—once divided between the Office of the Dean for Undergraduate Education and the Office of the Dean of the College—placing the two once autonomous branches entirely under Gross.

The appointment of Gross, who was then serving as dean for undergraduate education, seemed to signal a reinvigoration of the College’s academic focus.

Even before he appointed Gross, Kirby had made clear his hope to refresh Harvard’s undergraduate education.

When the Class of 2006 arrived on campus as freshmen in the fall of 2002, Kirby reminded the first-years of the importance of academics in undergraduate education.

“You are here to work, and your business here is to learn,” he said.

Have Kirby’s aspirations for the College panned out?

As the Curricular Review has stalled, the administration has tried to focus on other initiatives, like improving advising and increasing student-faculty interaction.

O’Brien, who served in an ex officio capacity on the review’s Committee on Advising and Counseling, said that academic reform necessarily takes longer than adjustments in student life.

“On the academic side, that has to proceed more slowly,” she said.

Gross, who heads the review with Kirby, said that the administration has to wait for FAS to approve the recommendations of the Curricular Review before the College administration can implement them.

“Once it becomes faculty policy, then it comes downstairs to the College to administer,” he said.

Gross has worked on bringing some academic reforms distinct from the Curricular Review to a Faculty vote, including a push to delay concentration choice to sophomore year.

In addition, Gross touts the creation of the interdisciplinary life sciences classes that were first offered this academic year.

While many undergraduates have flocked to Loker Pub Nights and to last fall’s Harvard State Fair, some of the academic reforms made by Gross’s administration have sparked strong reactions from students and faculty members.

Last December, Gross announced plans to hire a dean of advising, tapping Monique Rinere from Princeton to fill the new position. Arriving on campus on Feb. 27, Rinere made waves her sixth day on the job when she said that the Prefect Program—which matches upperclassmen with freshman entryways—would be “morphed” into a peer-advising group of upperclassmen.

And less than a month ago, a group of Special Concentration students gathered outside University Hall to protest the firing of longtime assistant dean Deborah Foster, whose responsibilities, she was told, would be subsumed by the new advising dean. Gross apologized to the students, saying he took “full responsibility” for what he called a “mistake,” and added that he would create a job in which she could retain a role in the direction of Special Concentrations and as a lecturer in Folklore and Mythology.

In an e-mail last week, Kirby, who intends to resign at the end of the academic year, offered full support for Gross’s initiatives.

“Dick Gross has been, and is, a wonderful Dean of Harvard College,” he wrote, adding that Gross has “done an enormous amount to make this a better place to learn.”

MEASURING UP

In a recent interview, Gross and O’Brien gave a colorful demonstration of their commitment to improving the undergraduate community.

O’Brien dumped a box full of College brochures—each with different colors and sizes—onto the desk in Gross’s University Hall office.

“This reminds me of what a senior in high school’s room looks like when they get information from different colleges,” O’Brien said. “I want some uniformity.”

“A lot of the community experience has to do with things looking pretty much the same,” Gross added, using the example of the Yard, whose red-brick uniformity projects a community feel, he said.

His office weathered mild ridicule from the Globe when it reported an advertisement on Harvard’s employment website seeking a director of internal communications to “assume leadership of branding efforts” within the College, creating “a unified brand for Harvard College across publications and websites.”

Gross and O’Brien said the director would be in charge of communications from the College to its students, a move they believe will help strengthen the undergraduate community.

Gross said that the College’s goal is not about projecting an image, but delivering on it.

“I want to measure up to the image,” Gross said. “I want people to get what they’re hoping for when they apply to the College.”

—Staff writer Liz C. Goodwin can be reached at goodwin@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Daniel J. T. Schuker can be reached at dschuker@fas.harvard.edu.