As Harvard undergraduates, we are constantly wearing a variety of masks. We’re the enlightened academics who dazzle in section; we’re the professionals who create paintings that could be displayed tomorrow at the MOMA; we’re the dancing queens who make our presence known at sweaty New Quincy parties. However, for many students, academic and social identities are not always mutually exclusive.
Many professors at Harvard come to know their students through informal contexts. Although the Dean of Undergraduate Education Susan Pederson encourages professors to eat in the dining halls with students for free, to attend Faculty dinners and to be accessible through office hours, some professors take their efforts to the next level, inviting students to socialize them at their homes at dinner parties or other forms of debauchery. Some of these parties are legendary—Harvard College Professor and John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures Maria Tatar’s “Fairy Tales” party that includes chocolate-covered strawberries and cocoa at her home, or William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government Harvey Mansfield’s receptions that have brought the likes of Tom Stoppard and Saul Bellow to Cambridge, among them. Many professors who have been bold enough to organize such fetes say that the benefits—both in and out of the classroom—are immense.
Take the government department’s annual Halloween party. The room is full of political scientists exercising their Harvard-groomed competitive streaks in an attempt to win the most creative costume contest. In the corner stand a couple of familiar looking TFs dressed as the gender gap, each one with stereotypical male or female complaints taped to every corner of their matching outfits. Professor Mansfield is chatting it up in the corner dressed, as he put it, in “a robe, Renaissance style hat and an evil-looking smile.” (He’s Machiavelli.) Over by the hors d’oeuvres table you spot a graduate student with a fake ax protruding from his back and a sign explanatory sign taped to his chest—it reads: “Assistant Professor.”
“I suppose the best way to look at it is just to consider intellectual exchange as a form of conversation,” Assistant Professor of History T. Robert Travers said. In December, Travers plans to host an Indian-food catered brunch at his home for his freshman seminar on the cultural history of the British Empire. “By creating a friendly environment, intellectual exchange will flow only more easily,” Travers says. “It helps me as a professor as well, because it makes me more sensitive to the needs and interests of my students.”
However, one interesting aspect of parties hosted by professors is the degree to which some professors are sensitive to the need to keep their parties private. Generally, there are two types of parties hosted by Harvard’s professional academic elite—those sponsored by the academic departments and those that remain a facet of the professor’s personal life. Parties such as Travers’ brunch and Mansfield’s receptions are excellent examples of parties of the first order. However, for those who organize more private—and many times more alcoholic bashes—the subject of their parties becomes taboo in public—or in The Crimson.
“I hope you won’t be offended, but my party… has always been a private one, and I would really like to keep it that way for a variety of reasons,” said one professor who holds an annual semi-famous, debaucherous party for students of his discipline.
For students who know professors on a personal level, there tends to arise some problematic issues about how to maintain a professional relationship. Dana M. Scardigli ’01-’02, also a Crimson editor, said that after becoming more acquainted with her thesis adviser, an anthropology professor, she had to become hyper-conscious of maintaining a professional air during the thesis-writing process. Scardigli socialized with her adviser and his wife at dinner parties at their home in Cambridge and while all three were doing summer research at the same time in Rome.
“One thing that really struck me was that as I was doing research with him in Rome, I would call him by his first name,” Scardigli said. “Back at school though, as soon I walk in his office, or see him with other members of the department, I’m always careful to address him as ‘professor.’ Once you’ve crossed that line of comfort, you have to make this constant transition to remain professional. But you do it—because you have to.”
However, for professors such as Mansfield, any risk to the professional relationship that could come through socializing is far outweighed by the benefits of such interactions.
“Making things run smoother in the classroom through socializing always runs the risk of cutting into your authority,” Mansfield said. “Maybe that is not such a bad thing though. It is always rewarding to know the student better, and I wouldn’t want to pass up such valuable social contact.”
The rewards of knowing students better come in many guises for these professors. In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, Weatherhead III University Professor Samuel P. Huntington discussed how his interactions with undergraduates are so rewarding because undergraduates tend to be more apt to challenge the professor than graduate students who are more respectful of academic norms. Travers said that his interactions have helped him to reconsider subjects outside of his traditional focus of British imperial history. Through his weekly lunches he has with undergraduates in his 40-person lecture class and his interactions with his freshman seminar, he has learned about the wide variety of subjects his undergraduates study and has rekindled his grade-school interest in Latin.
In fact, many undergraduates who study languages have had the opportunity to attend some of the most famous parties in professor-student party history. The Slavic Languages and Literatures Department is well known for its annual winter bash.
According to Slavic concentrator Molly J. Thomasy ’02, legend has it that one year the winter party was rowdy enough to get the Slavic department forever banned from using Adams House for functions. The winter party, however, was instrumental in helping Thomasy feel integrated into academic life at Harvard.
“I remembers, sophomore year when I was at the winter bash and I just didn’t really know anyone that well in the department,” Thomasy said. “It so much fun to see the professors behaving like real people. I’ll never forget when I saw the head of the department dancing up a storm to Madonna—it really made me feel at home.”
Many intro language classes, however, have trouble having individual class parties due to the fact that these classes are taught by TFs, who, unlike professors, are not reimbursed for party expenditures. Debra N. Prager, a Germanic Languages and Literatures graduate student whose love for parties has driven her to bring in lavish chocolate sweets for her Fairy Tales section and to dress in full Medieval garb from the ART for her Medieval Court section, has made huge efforts to provide an off-campus party for her German A class. She said one of her most vivid memories of her days socializing with undergraduates was when she picked up the six students from her German A class in her 1977 Chevy so she could drive them to her home.
However, Prager and many TFs contend that some of the biggest parties are happening in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department. Scardigli, who is a former Romance Languages and Literatures concentrator, said the best academic party she has attended was at Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Brad S. Epps’ apartment. The party celebrated the conclusion of Epps’ Spanish 135, a course on women writers in Barcelona.
“It was a dinner party with Chinese food and drinks at Epps’ beautiful apartment downtown,” Scardigli said. “Everyone was there—even the TF—and it was just a wonderful way to close the course and say thank you. It was very relaxing.”
Scardigli pointed out that Epps had to be very careful to ensure that no student under 21 years of age drank at the event. The alcohol that was served, however, didn’t seem to promote a spirit of drunkenness, but rather the European ideal of having wine with dinner.
“No one would dream of getting really drunk at something like this,” Scardigli said. “It just wouldn’t be respectful or appropriate.”
However, at many parties where alcohol is out of the picture all together, professors develop ways to compensate for student shyness. Mansfield has noticed this shyness to a degree among his students, usually as a trait that is more pronounced in males due to their need to prove a certain degree of manliness. (Note: see the professor’s upcoming book.) Mansfield said he tends to approach more quiet students by asking them more simple questions—where they are from or what they watch on television. He also tries to tell them jokes. Once students feel comfortable, he said, usually their intelligence takes over and they are eager to share their ideas. This comfort, then, allows for the relationship to be rewarding for both parties.
“One of the best things about socializing with the students is just that being with the young keeps you young,” Mansfield said. “It is so wonderful to see students outside of the classroom, which is usually a more formal and captive audience.”
Many students and professors said that the informal atmosphere outside of the classroom is most beneficial in breaking down myths that many students hold about their professors. Scardigli says that by attending dinner parties at her adviser’s home, she has come to better understand the life of the academic. This keen understanding of the lifestyle of professors has made Scardigli more strongly consider eventually pursuing a career in academics, an option that her adviser has often pushed. Travers sees a utility in professor-student socializing because it allows to students, who lead rather “closed lives,” to expand their horizons. He said he realized how isolated some of the first-years are in the Yard when a bus that brought his seminar back from a trip to Rudyard Kipling’s house in Vermont dropped the students off on Mount Auburn St. near the Cambridge post office. Many of the first-years didn’t know how to find their way back to the Yard.
“I think there is something really valuable in showing these very protected students that professors lead the lives of ordinary human beings,” Travers said. “I think is really reinforces their trust in me when they meet my wife and my beautiful baby. They need to know that I am a functional, social being. I think this makes me more approachable.”
