Education: March 2023 Archives
The End of the English Major | The New Yorker
"'Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction--all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!' Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard's dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. 'The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences--like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,' she said. 'Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.'
"Tara K. Menon, a junior professor who joined the English faculty in 2021, linked the shift to students arriving at college with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach. At Harvard, as elsewhere, courses that can be seen to approach an idea of canon, such as Humanities 10, an intensive, application-only survey, have been the focus of student concerns about too few Black artists in syllabi, or Eurocentric biases.
"'There's a real misunderstanding that you can come in and say, "I want to read post-colonial texts--that's the thing I want to study--and I have no interest in studying the work of dead white men,"' Menon said. 'My answer, in the big first lecture that I give, is, If you want to understand Arundhati Roy, or Salman Rushdie, or Zadie Smith, you have to read Dickens. Because one of the tragedies of the British Empire'--she smiled--'is that all those writers read all those books.'"
Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?
"This past semester, in her Intro to Accounting class, students took the midterm online--but in a proctored classroom using a browser that alerted teaching assistants if anyone navigated out of the exam in search of illicit information. To access the browser, students had to log in with an individual code given to them after they showed up for the exam....
"No one checked IDs to make sure the students enrolled in the class were the same students taking the final. Cheaters in the class paid fellow classmates--the ones who stayed in the proctored exam room--up to $100 to send them the codes so they could log in from outside the room, where they were free to look up information on their phones or brainstorm answers together. In case the Olds got smart and thought to track students' IP addresses--that is, where they actually were--students reserved study rooms in the same building as the exam room, Huntsman Hall, making it appear as though they were physically there. (It's unclear whether any proctors thought to check.)...
"Linda Griffith, an engineering professor at MIT, said bloated college bureaucracies--Harvard has roughly the same number of undergraduate students as administrators, and Stanford meets its 17,680-strong student population with approximately 15,750 administrators--are meant to cater to the every whim and need of an increasingly customer service-oriented student body."
