Advising Woes

Lewis' other crusade is to improve the state of academic advising in the College.

His five-year report contained data from surveys of the Classes of 1997 and 1999, which showed that many departments--particularly large ones like economics and government--have been doing a bad job at advising undergraduates and may actually be slipping.

For instance, only 34 percent of government concentrators in the Class of 1999 said their advising conversations covered appropriate courses to take, down from an already disappointing 53 percent in the Class of 1997.

Arguing that students are poorly served by departments that do not require senior Faculty members to advise undergraduates, Lewis has spent a great deal of energy--in conjunction with Dean of Undergraduate Education Susan G. Pedersen '82--trying to cajole departments into devoting more resources to advising.

The task is not easy. Departments are autonomous, as Lewis puts it, and it is tough to get tenured Faculty members to do anything that they do not want to do--they need to be given incentives.

And even if the College could penalize rogue departments, Lewis says it would not want to, for fear of hurting students. Carrot-and-stick coercion, in other words, does not work.

"There are no sticks," Lewis says.

So Lewis and Pedersen have tried to use persuasion, writing letters to a number of departments explaining their position and hoping that student voices on the Advising and Counseling Committee will convince certain departments to make reforms.

Results have been mixed.

For the economics department, the possibility of assigning professors formal advising responsibilities is not even on the table. Christopher L. Foote, director of undergraduate studies in economics, says the department's high student-faculty ratio makes such a change problematic. The department, he says, is looking into other ways to improve advising by graduate students.

The anthropology department, though, has quickly responded to Lewis and Pedersen's challenge. Last month, senior Faculty members from the social anthropology wing of the department met with chair William Fash and agreed to mandate a minimum of six undergraduate advisees per professor.

Lewis and Pedersen have also supported Undergraduate Council efforts to create a guide to concentrations that would let students compare the quality of advising across departments before choosing a concentration.

Putting The Houses In Order