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<p>[Teaching</a> Without Tenure: The Lecturer’s Role in a Harvard Education | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/12/5/tenure-faculty-lecturers/]Teaching”>Teaching Without Tenure: The Lecturer's Role in a Harvard Education | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>
<p>That 39% figure is really misleading. I think there’s a huge difference between “lecturers, preceptors, and [adjuncts]” and “visiting faculty, professors emeriti, and professors from other Harvard schools,” and I certainly wouldn’t get upset about the latter at all. I had some pretty amazing courses from visitors, emeriti, and professional-school faculty in my day.</p>
<p>It’s meaningful enough to say that 29% of enrollment is being taught by teachers who are clearly being treated as second-class. That seems plenty high to me, without sensationalizing it further.</p>
<p>Does anyone know what this figure would be at the other usual suspects?</p>
<p>To be clear, many ‘visiting faculty’ are essentially just glorified lecturers, hired via a process distinct from that of the ladder faculty.</p>
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<p>[Visiting</a> Professors Adjust to Harvard | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/9/30/visiting-professors-adjust-to-harvard-every/]Visiting”>Visiting Professors Adjust to Harvard | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>
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<p>I don’t doubt that many such faculty provide high-quality teaching, nor do I doubt that many lecturers do the same. Indeed, that is precisely why many lecturers and visiting profs are hired in the first place. </p>
<p>The real question is, what exactly is the value of research to undergraduates, both at Harvard and elsewhere, when you apparently don’t really need it to provide a high-quality teaching experience? The corollary question would be: why should hiring/recruiting for ladder-faculty, for which the possibility of tenure is reserved exclusively, be so predominantly weighted by research? You are far more likely to be hired as a new assistant (ladder) professor at Harvard (and peer universities) if you’re a terrible teacher who happens to publish in top journals than if you’re a stellar teacher who publishes in less prominent journals.</p>
<p>First, the number is slightly out of date as Harvard had been trying really hard to reduce non-tenure track faculties over the last couple of years. Furthermore, there is no need to have tenure-track faculty teach every class. For example, the freshman seminars are taught by some faculties who are appointed to Law School, Medical School etc. Some classes are small group discussions lead by graduate students, which are rather interlectually stimulating.</p>
<p>sakky-
So you’re saying that since non ladder faculty like preceptors and lecturers often work harder in their teaching duties and receive more positive feedback from students, the real problem is not the prominence of non ladder faculty but rather why these “better” teachers were not granted tenure positions. </p>
<p>Though I don’t disagree with that, I do very much appreciate how my professors are the innovators of their respective fields and the amount of passion they instill when they incorporate their own works in the course. Many were great teachers in addition to being great researchers, so research is not irrelevant to undergraduate teaching, nor is it mutually exclusive to good teaching. </p>
<p>Also, the student feedback used in the article as a determinant for teaching quality is very misleading in that, as HarvardParent pointed out, preceptors at Harvard generally teach small workshop-like classes for general academic requirement, which are more skill building than knowledge based, IMO. Those classes are inherently of a different nature than those taught by professors.</p>
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Chances are, the research history of the faculty is important for the status and growth of the university as a whole, as you probably already know perfectly well :)</p>
<p>Also, it’s reasonable to question how much of the non ladder faculty’s devotion to teaching is precisely due to their lack of tenureship, and how much tenure professors might have “slacked off” because they’re tenures. How well someone teaches is directly related to their efforts.</p>
<p>I don’t know what goes on at Harvard now, but the visiting professors I had courses with in college and law school were famous, established scholars who either had tenure elsewhere or were being evaluated for a “ladder” position. In law school, one of the visitors was Nino Scalia . . . you may have heard of him based on his subsequent career.</p>
<p>A cousin of mine spent a year visiting at Harvard. He chaired his department at a well-known LAC, and has published extensively. My sister-in-law, a University Professor at a major public university and recipient of numerous major academic honors, quite a big deal in her field, has periodically spent a semester visiting at other institutions, too. Never Harvard, but Harvard isn’t so much on the map in her field.</p>
<p>Who cares? Harvard is Harvard.</p>
<p>Most of the real teaching/learning occurs between classmates–the professors are really the cherry on top. Even in a course such as Math 55 which my S is taking, the real work takes place working on the problem sets in groups. The professor is important–but the sophomore CA is equally so and the student groups the most. We had most of his study group over for Thanksgiving break and I watched them teach each other the math. </p>
<p>And that is just the course work. The informal learning, at dining hall, at Starbucks, in common rooms or staircases in extracurricular settings is as, if not more, important than anything that happens in a classroom. Believe me, years later, these experiences are the ones you will recall and will view as the most formative. </p>
<p>Harvard isn’t for everyone. It is full of wonderfully quirky, self possessed/absorbed, “oblong” kids–it you want a school of well rounded kids --you may not be happy at Harvard–but if you are one of these students, then forget about “ladder” or “non ladder” faculty issues–really they are not key to your experience (and this is from someone who has studied and now taught/advised at Harvard for over three decades…)</p>