![[Critical Mass]](/archives/cmlogo.gif)
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January 15, 2003
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Harvard's Critical Mass
Last fall, Harvard sophomore Aaron Greenspan was so disgusted by how poorly an economics course was being taught that he successfully lobbied to have the professor removed from the classroom. Greenspan is now launching a web site designed to allow Harvard undergrads to communicate openly with one another about the quality--or lack thereof--of their courses. Named Critical Mass (no relation), it bills itself as
a web-based software application designed to make a positive difference in Harvard academics. Though students have no trouble voicing their frustrations to each other, many are often afraid to go to staff members, professors or administrators with their complaints. CriticalMass solves this problem by removing the communications barriers that exist between students and the rest of the University.
You must be a Harvard undergraduate to use the site, so I was unable to check out its contents. But this piece in the Boston Globe makes Greenspan's site sound like a local version of NoIndoctrination.org, minus the emphasis on bias. Like NoIndoctrination,org, Greenspan's Critical Mass allows students to criticize their professors anonymously.But where NoIndoctrination.org collects course reviews from students around the country, this one is limited to the Harvard undergraduate population. And where NoIndoctrination.org focusses on professors who allow their political biases to become the content of their courses, the Harvard site centers on quality, broadly defined.
According to Greenspan, there is a lot of terrible teaching at Harvard. His fall Econ course was a case in point:
Apparently the economics department has a difficulty with finding good teachers - at the last moment, they brought in a game theory professor. The man had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Not only that, but he couldn't teach. Here was a guy who was making arithmetic errors, not labeling graphs. What made me really angry was that he wouldn't answer questions. After a while, I just couldn't take it anymore. I wrote a letter to [economics department chairman] Oliver Hart. He came and sat in on the class. They actually removed him. He can't teach, there are no two ways about it.
Noting that some of his professors have yet to return papers to him that he wrote during his freshman year, Greenspan describes Critical Mass as a place where Harvard students can speak their minds about the shoddier aspects of their educations and even blacklist certain classes: "You can blacklist classes that you hated. If the administration is going to respond to anything, it's going to be to a list of classes that countless students don't like." Greenspan's comment speaks both to the depth of the problem at Harvard and the difficulty of getting anyone to take it seriously.
We are entering the era of the academic watchdog organization. Specifically, we are entering the era of academic watchdog web sites. In addition to NoIndoctrination.org and Harvard's new site, there are Campus Watch (Daniel Pipes' controversial site documenting the excesses of academic Middle East studies), Campus Nonsense (which chronicles left-wing bias on American campuses), a host of blogs, and the grand-daddy of them all, FIRE (which is fast becoming famous as a defender of student and faculty civil liberties). These sites and organizations are unpopular, to say the least, on campuses themselves, but that's to be expected when the reason they exist is that college and university faculty and administrators expect not to be held accountable for either the quality of the education they provide or their frequent disregard for the law. Here's hoping that these sites will inspire more sites, and that together, they can force American higher education to clean up its act.
