The (Regulated) Marketplace of Ideas

As I told Business Insider for a different story, "most of the people who are majors are converts from other fields, people who are switching over from all disciplines. This course is really kind of a conversion experience for a lot of people." I used the same metaphor in the long piece the Crimson published about CS50: “We are evangelical about our subject. … We want to compete for students. We want to take all the students who thought they couldn’t do computer science. We want them to understand that it’s going to going to be hard and fun. .... We’ve been doing the shenanigans for years.” (See this earlier blog post for the Confi Guide description of an ur-CS50 course I taught in the 1970s, if you think that David Malan invented clowning in CS at Harvard. And I didn't invent it either, I just picked up where Bill Bossert and Chuck Prenner left off.)

Departmental cultures run very deep, I have learned over the years. The idea that professors are supposed to be evangelical about their subjects is not universal. In some departments the attitude seems to be "We will teach, however reluctantly, whoever shows up, and complain about it if they are not intellectual enough"; in others it is, "I want to teach the students I want to teach; why should I teach students who don't want to be in my classes?" I wish I knew how many of the course "lotteries" (in scare quotes because they are often not based on random selection) are secondary admissions processes driven by faculty desires to select among the select. It is as though the limited concentrations, which were officially banned pursuant to Paul Martin's report on concentrations around the time the Core Curriculum came into being, are being recreated piecemeal as a nexus of limited-enrollment courses. Enrollment limits may be inevitable in some cases, but they are far too prevalent now, with no rules of which I am aware about when they are appropriate. Surely the most bizarre lottery story I have heard is that for Humanities 10, a brand new gateway course designed to draw students to Humanities concentrations and reverse the gradual decline in Humanities enrollments. It sounds like an absolutely wonderful course, vaguely resonant with the first term of the old Hum 5 course I took in the mid-1960s. Humanities 10 drew several hundred students--but was capped at 75. I wonder how many of those turned away took Ec 10 or CS50 instead, and will never return to the humanities except to satisfy their unattractively named "Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding" requirement? I think departmental cultures are actually not Harvard cultures so much as cultures of the various academic guilds. That would make sense--economists draw their norms from economists elsewhere, for example, not from the norms in the English department. One of the consequences of the unwinding of the faculty community at Harvard--I am old enough to remember when lots of us went to the Faculty Club to drink before heading home, something unthinkable today--is that we learn less from each other about how to behave. We learn from our departmental colleagues, and that's it. Given the self-perpetuating nat