Word: sections
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...encounter came midway through an extraordinary airborne conversation with Arafat that appears in this week's Interview section. Tracking down the P.L.O. leader took months of careful plotting. Gart finally caught up with Arafat at his heavily guarded compound four miles from the center of Baghdad. While he had interviewed Arafat on nine previous occasions, none had prepared Gart for the three-day, eight-hour talkathon that followed. Nor was he ready for the late-night meal at Arafat's table that featured five different preparations of lamb or the motorcade that careered through Baghdad at 80 m.p.h. Says Gart...
...million homosexuals who have AIDS in 1991. Or 10 million poor Blacks. Or 10 million intravenous drug users. It will be everyone, a cross-section of people that is Black and white, male and female, gay and heterosexual, rich and poor, who tests positive for the disease...
Unfortunately, as the admissions guide, to its credit, mentions, standing between you and that Nobel Laureate is your teaching fellow. What the guide neglects to elaborate upon, however, is the extent to which you must depend on your section leader: he/she interprets the word from on high, answers your questions, and perhaps most importantly, grades your papers. If a teaching system which gives disproportionate weight to section leaders than to full professors is accepted on face value (which is, of course, debatable), for $20,000, competent section leaders does not seem like too much...
STUDENTS have a right to section leaders whose teaching ability is commensurate with their effervescent resumes. Advertising big name professors without supplying competent section leaders borders on fraud. If the number of competent teaching fellows available within a discipline was indeed in question, which I doubt strongly, the ability to teach courses in that department would be undermined. Serious consideration should be given as to whether or not that course should be taught at all without a change in the teaching system...
Ultimately, it is the students who are paying the salaries of Harvard professors, while it is the stated goal of the College to educate said students. Therefore, the Faculty has an equal obligation and responsibility to teach their own sections or to hire a TF who can do just as well in their stead. Instructing section leaders to "[laugh] at one's self admitting ignorance (but not too often!" because it is one of the methods [the professor has] found effective," is hardly the way to go about continuing the Harvard tradition of of educating students...