A continuing project at Harvard is the Harvard Assessment Seminars established by President Derek Bok in 1982. It is the responsibility of the seminar to make periodic reports to the faculty and the nation on the success of students. The project was initially taken on by 27 Harvard faculty who decided that whatever else they accomplish, the report "must all be first-class science." The group was expanded to more than a hundred colleagues from various colleges and universities. The last report was issued in 1992 and is "first-class science."
The report should help all of us in higher education. After hundreds of interviews and thousands of questionnaires, the first conclusion of the report is probably the most important: "There is a common wisdom at many colleges that the best advice for students, in addition to just attending classes and doing homework, is: get involved. Get involved in campus activities of all sorts. Writing. Singing. Drama. Music. Politics. Athletics. Public service."This is excellent advice. I continue to share it with my own advisees. But there is a different kind of involvement, a more subtle kind, and the undergraduates who are both happiest and academically most successful stress its importance.
"Nearly without exception, these students have a least one, and often more than one, intense relationship built around academic work with other people. Some have it with a professor. Others have it with an adviser. Some build it with a group of fellow students outside of the classroom. The critical point is that this relationship is not merely social. It is organized to accomplish some work - a substantive exploration that students describe as `stretching' them. And nearly without exception, students who feel they have not yet found themselves, or fully hit their stride, report that they have not developed such relationships. Any college can take several concrete and low-cost steps to help students work more collegially."
The personal note of professor Richard J. Light, who chairs the project, reinforces the same point: "All the specific findings point to, and illustrate, one main idea. It is that students who get the most out of college, who grow the most academically, and who are happiest, organize their time to include interpersonal activities with faculty members, or with fellow students, built around substantive, academic work."
There is something here for students and faculty and for the public to understand. For students it is the same thing that they have been told for years, get involved academically. For the faculty there are implications for the way we work, in labs, in giant lecture halls, and with help from graduate students. The message is that we should bring students into our research and into our academic pursuits.
Public perception is that university professors either teach or research. The two main tasks of the university appear to be quite separate to the outsider. What's more, the perception is that teaching is what the public pays for and wants, and research is what they get. To put it bluntly, public perception is that teaching is valuable and research is not, and the university rewards the less valuable activity. We have all heard more than once the lament of the taxpayer: "The professor gets a good salary and only meets one or two classes. All the rest is research."
Within the university we also make the mistake sometimes of talking in terms or either teaching or research. We often reinforce the notion that within our community research is more valuable than teaching. After all, those who research and publish get grants, recognition, advancement and tenure. The truth is that most faculty see research as another way, a very important way, to teach. It is teaching that is even more important to our students than the well-prepared lectures delivered to 500 people at a shot.
Our best students are those who earn their way into our research interests. They will be the best graduates because they will understand the current research and will be a participant in the search for new and better ways of understanding the world and making things work.
Now we have the reinforcement of the Harvard Seminar. It has reported the obvious. Students like opportunities to be involved in scholarly activity with professors and other students. They thrive in this environment. Now we have two challenges: We must continue to look for ways to creatively involve students in scholarly activities and at the same time convince the public that this is one of the important goals of university research. Research can be teaching at its best when it helps "students organize their time to include interpersonal activities with faculty members, or with fellow students, built around substantive, academic work."