A Lesson in Self-Sufficiency

Shortly after I entered the fourth grade, my mother withdrew me from Minnesota’s public school system and set to teaching me on her own. For her, homeschooling was not an attempt to stall our inevitable separation, as it is for some parents. Rather, part of her competence as a teacher lay in her sense of when to leave me to chart the daily course, if not the greater trajectory, of my education on my own. Hers was a deliberate lesson in self-sufficiency: When the substance of my "homework" failed to satisfy, I was at liberty to educate myself at the local library. And if, on occasion, a difficult question perplexed even my mother, it was up to me to find the inspiration to move forward.

After five years at my dining room table, I enrolled at a formal high school. Certainly, I arrived deficient in some areas of knowledge, just as I was over-familiar with others, but I soon learned that my years of homeschooling, loosely structured and largely self-directed study had taught me early on the most important lesson of my academic career: that even the most skilled teacher is nothing without an able learner, and, moreover, that actively learning is miles away from passively "being taught."

It is a lesson that the Task Force on Teaching and Career Development, whose report, released in late January, highlighted the sobering state of the College’s "culture of teaching," would do well to note. By assigning the blame for Harvard’s pedagogical deficiencies wholly to the Faculty with scant mention of undergraduates and their own dismal culture of learning, the Task Force has failed to seize an opportunity of great magnitude.

Surely, neither the suggestions nor the criticisms of the Task Force’s report should be belittled. The institutional prioritization of teaching, as indicated by the report’s proposal that departments award superlative instruction when considering both tenure appointments and pay raises, is a welcome reform. To the extent that its proposed improvements to the "civic culture of teaching" will enhance the undergraduate experience, the report is a well-timed and thoughtful affirmation of the university’s commitment to its students.

But the report is not anything new. Rumors of some elusive Golden Age of Harvard academics––when professors and tutors "actually" cared about teaching, when graduate students did not need to publish-or-perish at the expense of instruction, and when learning was the rule, not the exception––have been circulating about campus since I arrived. Yet when it comes to undergraduate teaching (and cries for its improvement), things haven’t changed much in 300 years.

True, Harvard was deliberately founded in the British tradition of higher education, by which students and faculty would live in close quarters and interact not just as a society of scholars but as partners in the activities of daily life.

An admirable goal, no doubt, and one that may have served the College well before its graduating class broke a dozen students. Even so, to light on Harvard’s early years as the paradigm of student-faculty relations would be an egregious mistake. The expansion of the research university overseen by former President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1853, may have furthered the descent of the school’s more intimate collegiate atmosphere, but the British Model showed signs of strain as early as the 18th century, when undergraduates and tutors ended their chummy camaraderie (or, perhaps, forced co-habitation) and lived increasingly apart and at odds.

Of his years at Harvard, James Freeman Clarke, Class of 1829, recalled with no little ire that the Faculty subjected the students to a daily drilling in which "no attempt was made to interest us in our studies." The new century brought a fresh crop of (apparently) benighted undergraduates, and as late as 1963 yet another committee of Overseers to study Harvard’s teaching fellow program had unearthed "a considerable amount of uninspired, inexperienced, and weak teaching."

It is all too ironic that that finger-wagging is at its most furious today, when Harvard undergraduates have never had so much at the tips of their fingers. Never mind that professors willing to supervise independent studies abound, that research funding has never been so readily available, and that all but a handful of Harvard’s faculty members are as eager as ever to engage with students who actively seek them out. However, the CUE is espoused as the place of reckoning for hoardes of "delinquent" faculty, professors with early morning office hours are cited for negligence, and student-advocacy hawks nod with knowing smiles at interim President Derek Bok’s dismissal of the Ph.D. as "the only major professional program in the United States that does not prepare students for the activity that they will spend most of their professional lives [pursuing]."

It seems, however, that in the College’s three centuries of existence, the prioritization of teaching has always been a topic of controversy and quiet resignation. Witness President Eliot’s comments from over a century before Bok’s, comments as true today as they were then: "There are a few men and women who look upon [teaching] as a profession. The great majority of persons who teach, however, never intend to treat teaching as a profession." If anything can be gleaned from Harvard’s history, it is that the quality of an undergraduate education lies not in the hands of her faculty, but in those of her students.

Yes, devoted teachers have long been underappreciated, underpaid, and only rarely tenured. That the most recent Task Force’s report highlights ways in which a middle ground between excellence in research and commitment to instruction might be achieved is to be applauded.

Yet even if the institutional conservatism of professorial politics yields to such reform, the culture of teaching at Harvard can advance only as far as its culture of learning. So long as students demand that student-faculty solidarity expand in place of self-sufficiency, that four years of learning somehow be handed down from on high, any improvement in the quality of instruction available will be lost in the shallows of a passive education. School has an uncanny way of getting in the way of an education; while any effort toward uniting the two is a step forward, to forget that they are different would be to take two steps back.

A Harvard education is to be had—and always has been––by any student willing to take it for himself. A simple piece of paper come Commencement goes to all the rest.