Thursday, July 24, 2008

Teaching at Harvard

John H. Summers taught at Harvard:

I joined the staff of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University in 2000. As tutor, then as lecturer, I advised senior theses, conceived and conducted freshman and junior seminars and taught the year-long sophomore tutorial, Social Studies 10, six times. The fractured nature of my appointment, renewed annually for six successive years while never amounting to more than 65 per cent of a full-time position in any one year, kept me on the margins of prestige and promotion even as it kept me there long enough to serve three chairmen of social studies, two directors of study and three presidents of Harvard.
Summers' account of teaching "the rich, the powerful and the unalienated," with a grading scale running from A to B, reveals one kind of academic predicament: that of the professor who loathes the institution while desiring its approval. Read it all:

All the rich must have prizes (Times Higher Education)

comments: 1

JuliaR said...

Holy cow. I loved this line: "the sedulous banality of the rich". And his conclusion is worth quoting. I thought I had it bad. :)