Philosophy department participates in Teaching Campaign petition

Rain could not dampen the jubilant mood of the more than one hundred people who assembled on Tuesday outside Massachusetts Hall to deliver to President Drew Faust a petition calling for the capping of teaching sections to twelve students. Among those gathered were more than a dozen members of the philosophy department, including graduate students, faculty, and staff.

Delivery of the petition was just the most recent step by the Harvard Teaching Campaign to reduce section sizes in order to improve the quality of both the undergraduate educational experience and the professional development of graduate student, adjunct, and faculty teachers. Since its inception last spring, the campaign has been endorsed by over a dozen departments and committees and the petition has generated more than two thousand signatures by students, faculty, staff, and alumni/ae.

Fittingly, Norman E. Vuilleumier Professor Ned Hall of the Department of Philosophy—the first department to endorse the campaign’s goals—was among those who spoke at Tuesday’s event. Hall made clear that while Harvard can justly be regarded as the nation’s premier institution for research, “it cannot yet be considered the best place to send students for an undergraduate education. And we should be able to say that.”

While the campaign has predictably drawn large support from those in the humanities and social sciences, its goals have also been endorsed by graduate students and undergraduates in the physical sciences. According to several representatives from the sciences at Tuesday’s event, overly large lab sections not only diminish the quality of what undergraduates learn, they also create potential safety hazards for both students and teachers.

University administrators have responded that, while commitment to the quality of undergraduate education at Harvard is a priority, they have concerns about the costs involved in reducing section sizes.

At Tuesday’s gathering, Ned Hall addressed this concern, noting that “if Harvard can spend millions of dollars on HarvardX to bring needed educational opportunity to those beyond its campus, it can afford to invest millions of dollars to improve undergraduate education here at Harvard Alpha.”