'Leading in Learning'

Last spring, as a member of the Undergraduate Capital Campaign Task Force, I had the dubious privilege of being one of the first to hear Harvard’s newest fundraising pitch. I was struck by the Capital Campaign’s emphasis on the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the expense of the humanities or social sciences—and by its strange ideas on how to push forward “Teaching and Learning” initiatives. A year later, I am concerned that Harvard has its priorities wrong—our university continues to seek millions of dollars for “twenty-first century classrooms” while ignoring true obstacles to excellent undergraduate education.

In the past year, our university officially launched the creatively-named “Harvard Campaign,” which seeks to raise $6.5 billion across the university. Harvard has made public its intention to raise $2.5 billion for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, including $450 million earmarked directly for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; according to my most recent email from Dean Pfister, we’re more than halfway to that goal. The Harvard Campaign as a whole has identified several “aspirations” to which it encourages alumni to donate. These include “Meaning, Values, and Creativity,” “Integrated Knowledge,” and “Teaching and Learning.”

Harvard’s fundraisers told the Undergraduate Capital Campaign Task Force that the campaign priorities reflect what excites donors. Apparently, at least in the minds of Harvard’s fundraising staff, Harvard’s alums are thrilled by science and gadgets. The “Teaching and Learning” section of the Harvard Campaign relies on the rhetoric of technological progress, using phrases like “innovation in pedagogy,” “emerging insights,” and “the transformative potential of the digital age.”

The Harvard Campaign website suggests “a few examples” of ways in which your donation to Harvard might push forward teaching and learning initiatives: by creating “advanced pedagogical tools,” by funding “a suite of online courses through HarvardX,” or by supporting the “digitization of the Harvard Library’s extensive collection.”In particular, the Harvard Campaign for Arts and Sciences suggests donations to “support 21st-century classrooms,” in which “cutting-edge technology, digital tools, and flexible furniture enable innovative pedagogy and active learning.”

I’m sure that all of these proposals reflect well-developed and thoughtful plans on the part of Harvard University. But in my four years here, the rigidity of Harvard’s furniture has never seemed a major roadblock to my learning experience. In fact, I have had little to no interaction with technology in the classroom. While updated “digital tools” might be useful for statistical modelers, computer scientists, and engineers, they mean little to me, or to the hundreds of other undergraduates in the humanities and social sciences.

Instead, my day-to-day pedagogical experience has been much more heavily influenced by my teachers—the faculty, lecturers, and graduate students with whom I read, discuss, and learn. I have had the privilege to take a few seminar-sized classes led by really excellent educators. Professors including Edward Hall of the Philosophy Department; Henry Abelove, last year’s F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality; Sheila Jasanoff of the Program of Science, Technology, and Society; and Allan Brandt of the History of Science Department have all immensely enriched my intellectual life. These faculty members have demonstrated to me that great education requires pedagogical skill and care. My best classes at Harvard have relied on carefully curated syllabi and thoughtfully led class discussions—not on new media or technological interventions.If Harvard truly wants to improve the learning experience of its undergraduate students, it should invest in its teachers. Most students require not cutting-edge technology, but simply a decent classroom experience.

Happily, the Harvard Campaign need not grasp for vague solutions like “innovative classrooms”: The Harvard Teaching Campaign has begun to lay out a clear way forward for Harvard to improve teaching and learning. The Teaching Campaign demands that the university “commit to providing reasonably sized sections and lab groups” with a maximum of 12 students each. Even if all large lecture classes were also available on HarvardX, hour-long sections would still not allow time for every student to speak more than once. Even if every single room in Sever Hall were retrofitted with wall-sized computer screens, over-loaded teaching fellows might still fail to return problem sets on time.

Nicholas Christakis wrote last year in The New York Times, “The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior.” I might go even further and suggest that the social sciences and the humanities provide important insights into human welfare that the sciences can never approach. Harvard’s outsized investment in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences suggests that Harvard has great hope for the future of education and research in engineering. But Harvard should not forget its roots in the humanities and social sciences, nor the undergraduates and graduate students who depend on the archival and intellectual resources of this university for their research.

For someone whose academic work relies on computer modeling and programming, high-tech classrooms and state-of-the-art technologies could influence pedagogy. I, on the other hand, am happy in an old wood-paneled classroom and rigid furniture. If Harvard administrators want to improve the educational experience of the majority of our undergraduates and graduate students, they should focus not on updating classroom technology but on training professors and graduate students and allowing them to be good educators.

Sandra Y.L. Korn ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a joint history of science and studies of women, gender, and sexuality concentrator in Eliot House.