ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
Allen said that current CUE evaluations do not provide faculty with the information they need to improve their teaching.
“You’re evaluating based on a review for a book. [Answers to the question] ‘should you take this class’ are not terribly useful for improving pedagogical experience,” he said.
Despite these improvements, several committee members remained disappointed that the pedagogy institute was not recommended in the final report. Reiterating a familiar complaint, they expressed frustration that they were unable to influence the Steering Committee’s decision as much as they would have liked.
“It was a one-way communication,” said Baird Professor of Science Gary Feldman, also a committee member. “We were given the report four days before it became public and at that point there was only the chance to modify a word here or there rather than have a serious discussion about the issues.”
Student committee member Joseph K. Green ’05 said he had not been given a substantial explanation for why the idea of the institution never made it off the ground, but speculated that financial considerations influenced the decision.
“The only reason I’ve heard is that it’s not worth the resources,” said Green, expressing a sentiment shared by Feldman. But he said he found this to be “totally not a legitimate reason, in my opinion.”
Cohen said financial considerations were not the driving force behind the decision but added that “I think I’d rather we hire more faculty and improve the faculty-student ratio than invest a huge amount of money in a research tank.”
Allen offered a different theory.
“I would actually say that it was cut for political reasons,” Allen said.
The institute would have brought the Faculty of Arts and Science’s three principal pedagogical resources—the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, the Harvard Writing Project and the Instructional Computing Group—under one roof. And Allen said the creation of such an umbrella organization “would restructure administrative lines of command, and perhaps create more lines of command.” This would, he said, reduce the influence of the existing institutions’ administrators, who would now find themselves under the direction of the institute.
While the report did not initially include the suggestion, Associate Dean of the College Jeffrey Wolcowitz, the principal writer of the report, left the possibility open for the creation of an institute in the future.
“Several very good suggestions from various working groups didn’t make their way into the report in the way some people wanted, but that doesn’t mean that they were rejected or will not be considered further in the future,” he wrote in an e-mail.
—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.