These are excellent proposals that should be acted on immediately along with the visiting committee recommendations to begin solving the problems in the Economics Department. But it would be a mistake to consider these problems as unique to any one academic department. The Economics Department is only the most current and most public example of a common malaise afflicting all of Harvard academia to a lesser or greater degree. Regardless of degree, its symptoms are the same: an ingrown and complacent faculty too much concerned with research to the neglect of teaching, and a definition and acceptance of students as second-class citizens.
The Graduate Economics Club recommendation that students be included in the hiring process is the first clear demand, supported by official evidence of a department in decay, that students be recognized not as irresponsible transients or radical ogres, but as individuals with the right and the capacity to positively affect the decisions determining their education and four to six years of their lives. It was the students who pointed out the failings of the Economics Department, not the Faculty. And it was the students whom the visiting committee report agreed with.
Failure to include students as equal members in the Harvard community is a tyranny that has permitted the growth of an elitist and isolated faculty that sets its own standards and forces students to meet them.
IT IS CURIOUS that Harvard's neo-classical Economics Department is guilty of such gross monopoly practices, but that only serves to underline the severity of the problem. Every member of this community should follow the Graduate Economics Club's lead and demand changes in the University to make courses more relevant to students, to increase contact with senior faculty, and to force recognition of students as equals with the right to affect the decisions that determine their academic lives.
When the Faculty and a small selected group of students meet with Dean Rosovsky on Tuesday to discuss his "Letter on Undergraduate Education," they should follow the example of the Graduate Economics Club. They should organize a complete student evaluation of all professors, courses and departments to begin a coherent analysis of Harvard education. They should then vote to include students on the curriculum and hiring committees in every academic department.
Judging from the way Rosovsky has set up today's meeting--the first major discussion of what could be a set of sweeping changes in the nature of undergraduate education--the chances for that kind of reform do not seem especially good. Rosovsky has started off on the wrong foot with his reforms by effectively excluding the very people they are supposed to affect--students--from the first deliberations. The only students at today's meeting are members of faculty-student committees, and since the press is barred from the meeting the general student body will probably never find out anything about it.
The Economics Department is only the first small step to reforming the educational process at Harvard, but it is a good place to start.