College Cuts Q Guide Jobs

Students seeking to work for the Q Guide this summer had their hopes dashed when Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris announced last Thursday that the College will drastically alter the format of next year’s guide, eliminating the need for student involvement in the guide’s creation.

In an e-mail sent to summer applicants last Thursday, Q Guide editor Charles C. Bridge ’11 wrote that the change in content and move to an online-only edition meant that no students would be hired to work for the publication.

“This means that there will be no Q Guide staff this year—not only do Alex and I no longer have jobs to offer any of you, but our own jobs have vanished,” Bridge wrote in the e-mail. “The whole not-yet-complete Q staff just got laid off, basically.”

According to the e-mail, Bridge said he and Q Guide co-editor Alexander E. H. McNaughton ’11 had learned of the extent of the changes to the Q Guide on Wednesday, just before the information was released to the public.

“If this news makes you feel shocked, deceived, and as if you wasted your time, I can completely empathize because, frankly, I feel the same way,” Bridge wrote.

Bridge and McNaughton had met with the administration to discuss the decision to cut the printed version of the Q Guide, but they had not been told about plans to alter the guide’s format, said Douglas R. Lloyd ’09, a two-year veteran of the Q Guide who was helping advise this year’s editors.

According to an e-mail sent to students by Harris, the new version of the Q Guide will contain extensive numerical data and the full text of all student responses to the question of whether students would recommend the course to their peers.

“Regardless of the merits of this new system, we feel that the reduction of the Q Guide to only numerical evaluations and one full-text response will be detrimental to the informed choice of courses by students,” said a statement released by former Q Guide editors in chief Lindsey R. Canant ’09, Ginger E.R. Tanton ’09, and Russell I. Krupen ’07 and Lloyd, a former assistant editor in chief.

According to Tanton, the administration has been proposing to alter the format of the Q Guide for years, but she and other editors had pointed out the dangers of printing full text answers, some of which contain obscenities.

Tanton said administrators told her that they would omit obscene comments, which she said would lead to bias against negative responses.

Annie E.P. Stone ’10 and Anna Marie Wagner ’11, two of about 40 students who applied to work for the Q Guide this summer, said it was somewhat frustrating that the administration did not notify applicants of the change sooner. However, both thought that the news was most damaging to Bridge and McNaughton, the only two students who had officially been hired.

Tanton and Lloyd said they understood the administration’s desire to save money by ending the print edition and cutting student staff, but they expressed concern over how the end of student involvement will affect the legitimacy of the new version of the Q Guide.

“It’s always been the way that students can keep a check on the administration,” Lloyd said. “Taking it out of students’ hands will make it so much less reliable. I feel like it’s very disturbing that the administration now has complete control over releasing the evaluation data.”

—Staff writer Lauren D. Kiel can be reached at lkiel@fas.harvard.edu.