Word: section
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...section at Harvard is supposed to have more than 20 people in it, according to Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles. He acknowledges that "undergraduate migration" from one section to another because of better times or better teaching fellows does occur. However, the average should be 20 students per section for social science and humanities lecture courses, said Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz, with smaller maximums for lab science, language and quantitative methods courses. In other words, if a History Department lecture course has 40 people, it will be allotted money for two sections...
...students per section -- which all too often becomes a norm of 20 students per section -- is a ridiculous number in the first place. As Knowles himself declared in an interview with Harvard Magazine last spring, "I should much rather have a discussion for 55 minutes with 12 people than with 20." For one thing, 12 people can actually fit around one of those tables in Sever...
...section of 20 is more properly termed an entire class, and one of 25, like the section one history TF I know has this semester, is an entire lecture. I know that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has recently carved itself out of a significant budget deficit, and I know that Harvard is undergoing a capital campaign because it needs money, but there are few things more important than the contact students have with someone who actually knows their names and grades their papers...
...course, there are fiscal problems in reducing section size. If the cap for the social sciences and humanities lecture courses were 12, that would increase by nearly 70 percent the number of sections needed for those courses, which would in turn increase the amount of money needed to pay graduate students teaching those sections. But it could be done...
...know enough about the intricacies of the FAS operating budget to determine where the money should come from, and I don't really care. The administration must make a commitment to a smaller number of students in each humanities and social science lecture course section, and stick with...