“I think Niall brings so many things that we always look for,” Blackbourn says. “Outstanding intellect, books that make a difference, intellectual energy.”
“Not least, he’s a fabulous teacher,” Blackbourn adds.
Ferguson says while The New York Times has alleged that he has shirked his teaching duties to take on a public role, his interest in educating the world and his writing obligations have not come at his students’ expense.
“I’ve sometimes felt that [teaching] has been a drain on my energies, but I’ve never felt that I should duck out of it,” he says. “In percentage terms, over the last 15 years, I must have taught a lot more and devoted a lot more of my time to students than the great majority of professors.”
True to the economist in him, Ferguson finds fault with the way Oxford and Cambridge allocate their most precious academic resource—their professors. Ferguson says that undergraduate history students, with their diverse backgrounds and interests, can be taught in a large class instead of in a small, Oxford-style tutorial.
“In many ways, undergraduate teaching can be more rewarding—often was more rewarding for me at Oxford than graduate teaching—because the mix of people you get in an undergraduate class is necessarily different from the mix of people you get once they’ve all selected their graduate options,” he says. “I always felt Oxford had it the wrong way around. We were teaching undergraduates as if they were graduates and graduates as if they were undergraduates.”
At NYU, Ferguson says, he encountered the latter problem—graduate students being taught in a large class when they needed a tutorial system.
“I find myself spending a lot of time at NYU doing what are called ‘office hours,’ but they just do turn into a lot of miniature tutorials, which is difficult when you’ve got...nearly 300 students. I’d far rather have an explicit tutorial relationship than call it office hours,” he says. “You really end up with a situation where you practically have to hide or wear a false beard...once they’ve all had a midterm graded they all want to know why they didn’t get an A.”
Despite being successful wooed from NYU last summer, Ferguson will not arrive in Cambridge until this fall. For his first two years, he says, he will teach only one class so that he can develop new classes and have time to visit his family, which is still in England.
His first Harvard teaching will be an HBS course on “Business, Government and the International Economy” in spring 2005, and he plans to design a history department course on World War II, which could be taught as early as spring 2006. Ferguson says that he also wants to help in the history department’s implementation of the College’s ongoing curricular review, including the development of a world history survey course.
“[Harvard will] be an ideal place to direct...the development of historical minds,” Ferguson says. “That’s, after all, what being a professor is primarily about.”
—Staff writer Joshua D. Gottlieb can be reached at jdgottl@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Ella A. Hoffman can be reached at ehoffman@fas.harvard.edu.