Criticism from The Crimson

siserune
Mon, 19 Mar 2007 01:09:28 +0000

quote As the holder of an M.A. from Harvard, I can mention the faculty and the library facilities for starters; the greater financial support given to students.




Harvard has few departments with direct admission to MA-only programs (i.e., excluding professional masters such as MBA, MPH, M.Arch, courtesy masters en route to a PhD, and AB+MA bachelor’s degrees), so your information is perhaps out of date. Such programs are what one should compare with at Oxford. Both in the United States generally, and at such masters-only arrangements as exist at Harvard, almost any such program has no funding for anything, it is a program where the student pays to take courses and get an MA certification. The only situation I know of where a masters-only student can get funding at Harvard is if it directly is in line with a professor’s research program, so that he will use funds under his control, as in sponsored summer fieldwork in a place or subject close to prof’s research. Otherwise it is hit-or-miss depending on what funds are left over after the professors, PhD students, and undergraduates are taken care of.

What is more, the issue implicitly raised by the Crimson editorial was not “is Oxford as good as Harvard in every respect”, but rather “is Oxford substandard” (relative to most comparable MA programs at American universities, for example). The answer is clearly NO, as far as I can tell, especially when comparing full funding on a Rhodes to no funding for US masters degrees.

The claims about teaching by apathetic postdocs are also absurd; this happens just as much at Harvard, not to mention the teaching by perhaps enthusiastic, but not always qualified, undergraduates.