“Students aren’t coming in very frequently to talk to their adviser. That’s why I’d say that our biggest objective at the present time is to try to find ways to get students to come in to use the advising resources that we have,” says Krause, an assistant professor of government. “My sense is that it’s not that we have too few advising resources. It’s not that we need more advisers. It’s that we need to find ways to convince students to use the resources that we have.”

MATCHMAKING

To combat concerns that an advising center would be impersonal, some faculty have suggested that the current system under which a minority of first-years is advised by non-residential faculty members with similar academic interests should be expanded.

Losick points out that Princeton has already established such a system for all its approximately 1,160 first-year students.

“I’ve heard good things about Princeton because freshmen are assigned to faculty in broad areas according to their provisional interests they indicate in the summer before freshman year,” Losick says.

Faculty such as Asani who have served as first-year advisers generally sing the praises of the setup.

“You have a match that takes place between incoming students and faculty that’s the ideal. In a sense, it helps the transition from freshman year to concentration because you’ve worked with a faculty member who knows the system well and is able to give broad, intellectual advice on how to approach things,” Asani says.

Liora R. Halperin ’05, who had Asani as her first-year adviser, says that based upon her own positive experience, she feels all first-years should have non-residential advisers.

“I was really lucky in my freshman year because I had a non-residential adviser who was in the concentration I was interested in. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. Unfortunately, everyone else I knew had proctors that knew nothing about the undergraduate curriculum,” she says.

But Susan C. Merenda ’07, who is advised by a professor involved in theatre, says that because she already knew that she wanted to study theatre entering Harvard, she might have been just as happy with her Weld proctor as a sole adviser.

Regardless of whether faculty advisers would be effective, Nathans points out that Harvard simply doesn’t have enough faculty to follow the Princeton model.

“We’d like to do that,” Nathans says. “[But] most members of the faculty advise only two or three students. There are approximately 1,600 students in the freshman class.”

Harvard would need a “major cultural change that is probably never going to occur” to be able to match up all students with faculty, she says.

Biel, who is also a non-residential first-year adviser, shares Nathans’ concerns.

“Harvard faculty members are stretched very thin with all sorts of commitments...I have at most three freshman advisees every year. I don’t know how it would shake out if every faculty member had a certain number of advisees,” he says. “If the resources of the University are spread too thin, then you’re not going to have those close advising relationships.”