Another result of "separating the men from the boys" is that women may be disproportionately weeded out. Although a female scientist at Harvard may face little discrimination severe enough to damage her career, there is little chance that there will be many female physics graduates at Harvard under a system that makes most first-year students ineligible to study physics before they arrive. The discrimination is carried out by parents who are less likely to encourage their 12-year-old daughters to shun their friends and other interests to study physics and math and go to math camp. This should not be required of children of either sex.
The obnoxiousness of the system does not end after the weeding out during the first two years. Although other departments have outside factors that affect student performance, in the Physics Department, these factors are intentionally maximized. Most harmful is the poor teaching because without adequate teaching, there is no hope for those who start from behind.
The myth of genius says that if you're smart enough to be a physicist, you don't need to be taught. Too many students believe this--some relish the masochism, others are too cowered to admit their difficulties and so never complain. I hope this article encourages other to complain or at least not to take the department personally.
The myth of genius is harmful not just to students, but to the field itself. What percentage of graduating seniors in physics are geniuses? I'll avoid the question by setting a safe upper bound of one genius each year. In other words, almost all physicists are not geniuses.
After realizing this fact, the system appears even more pretentious and ludicrous. Most scientists work within one field their whole careers and accept a large body of knowledge which changes little even in this fast-paced century.
In a sense physics is like a language. The students who speak Spanish at home will do better in Spanish A than the one who never took Spanish before. This is no mark of genius. The idea that the Romance Languages Department should weed students out by using poor teaching materials or lecturing too fast for students to comprehend is ridiculous. Almost every Harvard student has the potential to learn fluent Spanish.
The assumption should also be that most Harvard students could be competent physicists. Therefore, the same attention to teaching techniques and materials found in Boylston should be found in Jefferson. I believe successful techniques in teaching both disciplines would be very similar.
Some people may take my attack on the "myth of genius" as an attack on elitism. I could not reconcile being anti-elitist with being at Harvard. However, elitism must serve its purpose: to be an incentive for excellence and to help group excellent people together so that they may be more productive. The Physics Department, as currently structured, does neither.
Peter L. Clateman '90 concentrates in Physics.