Word: espp
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...jock" stereotype is not far off. Of the roughly 50 players shown on the team's Web site and in the Harvard Football News, over 97 percent concentrate in economics, psychology, government, sociology and environmental sciences and public policy (ESPP...
...case, learn New England botany, discuss nature writing with authors, research term papers that often lead to theses and travel to Costa Rica for an in-depth look at one community's grassroots conservation efforts. The nine-year-old course has subsisted for the past five years as an ESPP tutorial, with only 25 percent of its funding provided by the university. Outside sources have supplied the rest: E.O. Wilson, the father of conservation biology and one of Harvard's most renowned professors, secured funding on his own initiative for the course over the past three years...
This year, those sources dried up, jeopardizing the continued existence of a class that actually delivers on all of Harvard's promises. ESPP, however, was given the chance to save it. An internal committee reviewed the ESPP concentration this year, providing the perfect opportunity for the concentration chairs to ask that the administration put its money at least vaguely near where its mouth is and commit funds to the course. When students and alumni learned that the class was going to be cancelled, they mounted a letter-writing campaign, appealing to the President, the Provost, the Dean of the Faculty...
...only did the students receive no response from the ESPP committee (Dean Knowles wrote only a perfunctory reply), but no student input at all was allowed in the "review" process--an astonishing display of administrative arrogance in a concentration that desperately needs restructuring. The concentration chairs refused to request money for the course: Conservation Biology and Biodiversity, the quintessential "small interdisciplinary seminar," will not be returning next fall; nor will two of Harvard's best teachers...
...ESPP claims that the course will return next year without Adelson and Perlman; they frame this event as just another case of regular turnover on the teaching staff. But beyond the obvious differences in content and quality that different professors would bring, we doubt that anything resembling Conservation Biology and Biodiversity could be taught by anyone but Perlman and Adelson. Junior Faculty have no incentive to invest the enormous time and energy such a course requires when it takes them away from the publishing that will garner them tenure; Senior Faculty have no incentive to leave their research and spend...