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July-August 2008
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Education by Office Hour
The Harvard I know today began in the most unlikely of ways: with a cup of tea, served loose-leaf in a ceramic mug, as I sat at a table littered with books and papers, impossibly squeezed between the bookshelves and free-standing chalkboard of a narrow Semitic Museum office. I had come to interview for a spot in the wildly popular freshman seminar of James Russell, Mashtots professor of Armenian studies and unlikely champion of the “Great Books” education I so desired my first year. What was supposed to be a 15-minute chat had somehow stretched over three hours, but the four other students in the office and I remained enthralled by the same thought: I came to Harvard to be a student, and here, two weeks in, I have found a teacher. At least, I hoped I had, as I finally found it in me to ask for a coveted place in Russell’s seminar. “Oh, that,” he said with a smile, apparently surprised it was the seminar, and not the complexities of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, that was on my mind. “Yes, you may do the reading for Tuesday, if you like.” So my Harvard began, quite fortuitously, with office hours, the weekly periods during which professors forgo their other, doubtless more pressing, duties to meet with students. It was in and through these informal encounters—with professors I admired, and who, for some strange reason, seemed to take me and my education seriously—that I came into my own at the College. The purpose of the office hour (and it is, despite the common use of the plural, frequently only an hour) is obvious: to provide an opportunity for student-faculty interactions outside the seminar room or lecture hall. The practice is common at many other schools, but Harvard’s take on it is peculiar, if only because it reflects a deeper problem with campus life. “In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need to have office hours,” says Lino Pertile, Harvard College Professor and Pescosolido professor of Romance languages and literatures, who is also the master of Eliot House. Students would interact with professors as they would with friends: casually in departmental centers, over dinner, after class. But on the whole, this doesn’t happen. Students, for their part, are more keen to avoid their professors than to engage them; professors, or so the conventional wisdom goes, are more focused on their research than their teaching. As it is, Pertile says, these officially sanctioned periods of interaction “are symptomatic of the incomplete relationship that exists between undergraduates and professors—office hours themselves are an attempt to respond to a need for interaction that is not satisfied in the day-to-day exchange between student and professor.” At the heart of this fraught relationship is the widespread perception among students that the Harvard professoriat is distant and inaccessible. The belief is nothing if not longstanding, and today, as ever, there is some degree of truth to it: at any university as large at Harvard—especially one where the scholarly output of faculty members is so highly valued in tenure decisions—there are bound to be some professors overly devoted to their own specialized field, committed to the training of their graduate students, and limited in the amount of time they can spend on their undergraduates. For every Harvard College Professor—a competitive appointment awarded only to select faculty members with a demonstrated commitment to undergraduate teaching—there are many others overwhelmed by crowded lectures for Core and other introductory classes; that a student-professor gulf exists in such impersonal environments is only to be expected. Of course, there are also some instructors who simply don’t care: the English professor who stares blankly when asked the simplest of queries; the mathematics professor who asks impossibly and embarrassingly difficult questions to those brave enough to open his door; the economics professor who requires that students submit specific questions through his assistant before scheduling, or not scheduling, an “office hour” session. What these alleged cases of professorial neglect conceal, however, are the countless professors who do want students to come meet with them. All too often, students cling to the tenuous myth of the distant Harvard professor to vindicate their own inaction; when they do, the myth perpetuates itself, breeding a widespread passivity among students that further frays the student-faculty bond. “At Harvard there is this sort of myth that undergraduates don’t have access to professors,” Pertile notes, “and so often undergraduates don’t even try, and office hours go unused.” Even when students do try, the results can be less than perfect. They were for me, numerous times in my freshman year. Awed by the mellifluous lectures of an English professor, I ventured one day to his office to discuss a poem that we hadn’t had time to cover in class. Expecting him to wax poetic while I reclined, I withered at his request that I first provide my own interpretation. He listened to my bumbling far longer than I would have liked before commenting dryly, gently: “It is advisable to consider such things before knocking, don’t you think?” 1 | 2 | continued >  
 
 
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