Gov Tutorial Draws Few Attendees

Students dozing off behind their laptops are a common sight in large lectures at Harvard. But Government 97b, the second half of the required yearlong sophomore government tutorial, is dealing with a more serious problem—its mandatory lectures attract few students.

The course policy requires all 250 enrolled students to attend lecture, according to Jacob M. Kline, the head teaching fellow. But attendance in the weekly lectures, which are not videotaped, is at a low. Government concentrator Carrie E. Andersen ’08 estimated that roughly 40 students—around 15 percent—go regularly.

“There are maybe 10 people actually paying attention. The rest go out of some normative sense of duty,” she said.

The weekly lectures in Gov 97b are new this year.

Stanfield Professor of International Peace Jeffry A. Frieden taught the first half of Gov 97b, and Lecturer on Government Andrea M. Gates has assumed teaching responsibilities for the second half of the semester.

The tutorial this spring focuses on international relations. Gov 97a centered on political theory. In response to the new material, the professors “changed the structure to be more like a normal class,” Frieden said.

“There’s definitely a contingent of people who want to send a message that [the lectures] weren’t a good idea,” Andersen said of the low attendance. “And then there are other people who just find the lectures useless and don’t go.”

David L. Tannenwald ’08, also a government concentrator, said he thought that boycotting lecture was not a good way to effect change.

“If you don’t think you’re getting something out of the lecture and you stop going, that’s your prerogative,” Tannenwald said. “But that’s probably step number 10 on the solution list. It makes much more sense to talk to the professors, to talk to your TFs.”

But Kline said that it was unclear what fraction of students who skip are doing so out of protest. “An ‘unoffficial boycott’ seems to me [a] paradox,” Kline wrote. “How it is to be distinguished from mere absence, or laziness?”

Both Frieden and Gates said that students might be confused by the change in format this semester since the tutorial has had far fewer lectures in previous years. This confusion may be a factor in student dissatisfaction, according to Frieden.

But this dissatisfaction is not universal.

“I think it’s wonderful that they’re having lectures every week,” Tannenwald said. “The professors are very accessible...It’s an excellent course.”

On Monday students were informed by e-mail that the lecture, which originally ran from 2-4, would be shortened by an hour. According to Kline this decision was made independently of student concerns.

“A decision [was] based on the fact that the readings for the remainder of the course are better suited to a two-hour discussion in our two-hour sections,” Kline wrote in an e-mail.

Lackluster attendance is not uncommon in Harvard’s large lectures. Salvador A. Pelayo ’09 said that around half of the students in Life Sciences 1a, “An Integrated Introduction to the Life Sciences: Chemistry, Molecular Biology, and Cell Biology,” this semester attend the lectures. “Sometimes there are as many students as there are TFs sitting in lecture,” he said.

Frieden said that the sophomore government tutorial would likely be different next year, especially if concentration choice is pushed back. First-year students are set to declare their concentration choices shortly.

Kline wrote in an e-mail that he did not believe the current tutorial will have any effect on the number of concentrators.

“Government declarations have grown every year that I have been at Harvard. Why should that cease?”

Andersen disagreed. “I predict a high number of social studies applications this year,” she said.

­—Staff writer Jillian M. Bunting can be reached at jbunting@fas.harvard.edu.