Ex-dean says Harvard run like day care

[survivor999]

By Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff | May 27, 2006

Harvard University leaders are running the school like ``a day care center for college students," trying to dazzle undergraduates with concerts and a new pub, rather than teaching them to be responsible citizens, a former Harvard dean writes in a newly released book.

Harry R. Lewis -- the former dean of Harvard College, who many believe was pushed out of his post for being critical of President Lawrence H. Summers -- writes that the university has gone off track in a number of ways. His book is ``Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education," published earlier this month by PublicAffairs.

The book is generating a lot of buzz on campus; Lewis's reading at the Harvard Coop was standing-room only, and the book is on Harvard Book Store's bestseller list. Many students are aghast at the idea they are being coddled, but some of Lewis's colleagues expect the book will be influential as the university searches for a new president and tries to breathe new life into efforts to revise the undergraduate curriculum. Several Harvard administrators whose policies Lewis criticized, including Summers, declined through spokesmen to comment on the book.

Both controversial and popular as dean from 1995 to 2003, Lewis earned his bachelor's degree and doctorate at Harvard and has taught in the computer science department since 1974. His wife, Marlyn McGrath Lewis, is director of undergraduate admissions. One daughter is a Harvard College graduate about to earn a Harvard MBA; another is an undergraduate.

Lewis says his book is not sour grapes over his ouster, and he dwells only briefly on Summers, writing that the president was arrogant, a poor manager, and ``voiced opinions but advanced no reasoned intellectual agenda." Rather, Lewis said in an interview, the book is the result of his attempt to make sense of the forces pushing his beloved university into a ``consumerist" mode.

He said that other elite universities suffer many of the same problems.

Ful story here: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/05/27/ex_dean_says_harvard_run_like_day_care?mode=PF

[AndreaCG]

1. Look at Bush's aide de camp

Getting into the graduate level business school without an undergraduate degree.

Carrying around Bush's Mentos hardly qualifies as the requisite exerience needed to bypass normal procedures.

[survivor999]

2. No problem...

If you are wealthy and well-connected, you'll get in... I heard there is even an "official" admission category for that... After all, it's their place, they can admit whomever they want...

[deFaultLine]

4. Not just Harvard

I think that the sense of entitlement for many university students is rampant. There is little effort towards providing an environment where students are taught how to think and simply passed along because they have the means to pay for the high cost of college tuition. It looks like a summer camp system everywhere.

Costs of higher education have soared in the past 5 years putting it out of reach of many middle class people.

If you want a dictatorship, an educated population is not what you want.

[survivor999]

5. I agree....

Not just Harvard... It's generalized... But at least private schools could run things differently, if the people at the top were real leaders...

[jwirr]

7. That is a good observation. When it is only the wealthy who

are attending the universities it is sooooooo easy to see the world from one viewpoint. I went to college as one of the first poor married/divorced students in my school. At the same time they were admitting many minority students. All of us had an uphill fight to show that there is another world out there. It was a rare awakening for many of the other students when they could actually set down and ask questions of real people. Even many of the profs were learning.

[survivor999]

9. The funny thing is that Harvard

Has many minorities students... And gives out a lot of aid for students from families "of modest means"... It's not a WASPY community in any way, at least at the student level... Yet, something is not working...

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

21. Why does he even need to attend the Biz school? Why not just mail him

the diploma. If he doesn't even need come close to the usual standard of being a college grad, why not just send the children of the well connected a Harvard Business School Diploma when they finish junior high? Hell, for those kind of connections, the university ought to be paying THEM, and maybe they are.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

22. Bush Lackey/dropout admitted to Harvard Business School discussed here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1300263

[enlightenment]

3. The Ivy leagues are in trouble, but they're not alone.

Attempting to increase enrollments by offering perks that have little to do with academia is a growing trend at universities private and public.

UNLV (Las Vegas) is in the process of building a multi-million dollar student union expansion. Granted, the old one was small, but I've never seen it busting out at the seams. The new one will have a theater, a post office, and a bar -- among other things. There is a post office and several bars right across the street -- most of the theaters in LV are in the casinos.
They are also building a new, multi-million dollar athletic facility; not for training in related fields, but to provide more toys for students -- new pools, rock-climbing wall, etcetera.

Meanwhile, class size had to be capped because they were exceeding the number allowed by the fire code -- classes are canceled or simply not offered because there is no place to hold them -- and departments are struggling to keep up with inadequate staff (that they can't augment because there is no money).

To top it off is where the money for the above projects is coming from; largely from the students via a fee that increases every semester (up to almost $400). Most of the students paying for these new perks will never have the chance to use them, since they will have graduated before they are completed.

I'd much prefer to see more classrooms, more professors, more offerings and smaller class sizes -- more books in the library, more subscriptions to academic journals, more grant and scholarship money available to assist students achieve their academic goals.
Those things aren't sexy, I guess.

[deFaultLine]

6. Librarians

It amazes me that library budgets are cut and fluff like rec centers are funded. There is an attitude at the administrative level that everything you need to know can be found in pdf form.

Meanwhile, jobs such as reference librarians are being eliminated. This is what you could call a false savings in that it costs more to eliminate a persons job like that than to have a professor running around trying to find materials he needs for his research.

Think about spending months writing a grant proposal and making sure that you are trying to build on research that is up to date. Using some of the search engines will provide many, many dead links...about 20% last I recall. But a hard copy will often exist in a library and a reference librarian can speed the process up greatly.

[survivor999]

8. Hmmm... I disagree with the cuts...

Since I like paper libraries! But, with regards to writing up-to-date grants at least in biomedical fields... The integrated electronic systems with access to all journals are way more efficient than having to go to the library... And for the few old references that may not be online, one can always mail in a request to some other paper library in the system... Electronic journals are a dream come true in this respect...

[deFaultLine]

12. pdfs

I love pdfs and use them quite a lot myself. But there is no substitute for verifying something in a hard copy. It does you no good to cite something that can't be found 6 months later. There are few things more frustrating than trying to look up a dead link in an electronic reference.

Also, if you mail in a request for for an article and it takes 6 weeks to get to you because of budget cuts, you may face a delay that may cost you a lot. A few bucks saved on a librarians salary may cost a lot more down the road.

[MountainLaurel]

13. True dat

I'm a librarian in an academic medical center (medical school, nursing, etc.) As of July, our journal collection will be about 95 percent online only. We've got the print copies of what we don't have online, particularly those before 1995 or so, which is when much biomedical journal access begins. There have been two factors in us doing so: The huge increase in scholarly journal prices (and simultaneous cuts from our budget due in part to some office workers bilking money from NIH) and a push from our users, particularly clinical faculty and researchers. As NIH is cutting grants, it's harder for them to hire research assistants to do the literature searching, and these folks don't have the time to run to the library when they're also seeing patients or in the lab for 50 hours a week.

[enlightenment]

11. I'd like to see more librarians

but I would also like to see those that are there keeping up with the technology, which isn't always the case.
I teach a research class for historians; mostly 1st and 2nd year students; and they have to locate and use sources that range from the most high-tech to the old card catalog buried in the corner. They also have to learn to take advantage of the research librarians' knowledge -- and it's a little disturbing that some of those librarians don't know anything about the databases I'm asking the students to locate and use (on occasion, there have been librarians who don't know how to locate and use the older information sources, but not nearly as often). I guess I do expect a level of expertise, or at least an honest "I don't know, but I'll find out" response.

Still, bottom line is that we need to decide the purpose of higher education -- is it to educate or just to add a line on a student's resume?
If it's education, then let's spend the money on the tools to improve the process; if it's a line on the resume, close the libraries and the classrooms and build another pub. woo hoo.

[survivor999]

14. It's tricky....

In many cases, students and their families complain if the teacher challanges them... They don't get the idea that real learning is painful and requires hard work... Not different from lerning how to run a marathon... So, what should a teacher do? The students complain if their classes are "hard"... The administration complains if the students complain. It is actually easier to prepare a course that does not challange students and simply entertains them... Why should a teacher not go along with it?... No reason, really...

[enlightenment]

16. I hear you there!

It's a tightrope walk between expectations (none of which are your own . . .).

I try -- emphasis on try -- to encourage my students to want to make the higher leap; a combination of respect for their abilities and/or potential and reverse psychology. Sometimes its works.

My reward is the student who will remark on their evaluation that they thought they were going to 'hate' me and 'hate' the class because it was too hard -- but discovered instead that it was challenging and 'fun' and relevant. Sometimes they write that.

At the end of the day, you can't win them all, or save them all from themselves.

[bobbieinok]

17. importance of librarians--doing PhD research in the 60s

(I was at a prestige university working on a degree in German studies.)

Several times I found references only in older articles; I could not find these in any bibliography (foreign or domestic) I could locate.

There was an older inter-library loan librarian in the univ library who found them all by a process of her immence knowledge, her intuition.....and what looked like magic. The senior faculty considered her a priceless treasure; they had arranged for a younger librarian to work with her in the hopes her 'secret' could be discovered and passed on to others.

I don't know how successful the project was.

Without that librarian my research and the resulting dissertation would have been much poorer.

[deFaultLine]

19. Wow

Great story, I've run into a few of them, they are invaluable when you are looking for something obscure but might be cutting edge.

There's nothing like spinning your wheels for a few days and then in 5 minutes, they find exactly what you were looking for.

[Yupster]

20. College tuition has risen

way faster than the rate of inflation over the last 30 years.

I know professors aren't making tons of money so I've wondered where all the money is going.

You helped answer that question for me.

[WinkyDink]

10. I've heard that once you're accepted, you're good to graduate.

Can't have any Admissions Office mistakes.

[elehhhhna]

15. Massive grade inflation. MASSIVE.

[bobbieinok]

18. I was told that at one ivy grad school, they assumed anyone

admitted would do well.......therefore there was very little supervision of the grammatical/organizational structure during the writing of the PhD dissertationx.......the one I questioned had very interesting content but was poorly written by the standards my advisor required me to follow