Harvard Doesn’t Care About Students

Having been removed from direct employment by an institution of higher education for quite some time, my emotional response to what I believe to be shortsighted choices at the administrative level that are aggressively anti-student and anti-learning has become considerably more muted than they once might have been.

When immersed in the day-to-day struggle, these affronts felt personal, an assault on the dignity of my work, even when the actions didn’t directly affect me. Now, when a bit of upsetting news crosses my feed, I tend to be a little bit more detached.

I’ve entered my trying-to-be-amused stage, but a recent bit of news threatens to trigger the disgust response I thought I’d left behind.

As reported by The Harvard Crimson, Harvard University has laid off the director of the Harvard College Writing Center as part of a larger administrative consolidation in the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences.

I won’t pretend to be objective here. That laid-off director is Jane Rosenzweig, who has become a friend of mine during this era of ChatGPT-distorted writing instruction. I’ve zoomed into her first-year writing class multiple times to interact with her students and frequently picked her brain for insights into the challenges of the era. Her newsletter, The Important Work, is a clearinghouse for testimonies on the range of experiences instructors and students are having in meeting the challenges of this era.

She has worked at Harvard for over two decades, and the place has been lucky to have her. Students have started and circulated an open letter protesting the administrative action. Dozens of students have offered lengthy personal testimonies as to the value of the Writing Center and Jane’s leadership.

These students describe the Harvard administration’s decision as flabbergasting, shocking, sad, painful, baffling, deeply disturbing, tremendously disturbing, heartbreaking, horrifying, shortsighted, dismaying, jaw-dropping and “absolute bullshit.”

Indeed.

I will be frank: I think the chances that this decision gets reversed because of student pushback or public outrage are near zero. If Jane asked me my opinion if she should go back, were the decision to be reversed, my answer would be “not without a significant raise, contractual guarantees around her employment and the structure of the center, and an apology.”

The reason for these feelings is because the administrators who have made this choice have told us who they are and what matters to them. Budgets are a statement of values, and they apparently do not have the experience or wisdom to recognize what is obviously valuable.

These are not people to be trusted, even if it comes in writing.

I’m sure there are a zillion rationales around cost and efficiency for this, at the richest university in the history of the world, but they are, to quote one of the Harvard alumni above, absolute bullshit.

I have long given up trying to understand the mindsets of the people who make these decisions so carelessly. I am reminded of an episode at Stanford a couple years back where a similarly inexplicable decision was made to tear down the undergraduate program in creative writing. In that piece I quote the same Elvis Costello lyrics. I suppose these words have become something of a mantra for me.

Harvard, for all the ill feeling and spate of critical coverage they may receive, will not be thrown off the path of being Harvard, a place that is primarily oriented around the cultivation of prestige and the interests of the institutionally privileged. Anyone who believes Harvard as an entity cares about students is kidding themselves. The fact that many faculty and staff at Harvard do care about students is simply individuals acting in defiance of the institutional priorities.

I know this work well.

Jane Rosenzweig has the misfortune of being staff at Harvard, the people who spend time knitting together the high-flown rhetoric of the institutional mission and the on-the-ground experience of students, but who rarely get the respect and recognition they deserve.

Those student statements on the impact of Jane’s work are their own form of recognition, the kind of recognition any one of us would love to receive from those we’ve most impacted, but they have no value at a place like Harvard. If a reorganization was in order, a proper organization, a well-run institution would see staff like Jane Rosenzweig, with her experience and expertise, as the place to start, rather than part of the body count to be disposed of. Harvard claims the student tutor experience will be the same, but this is ipso facto not the case—more absolute bullshit. Harvard does not care about the experience of student writing tutors. They only care if they can continue to say that they have students who tutor writing.

These issues are no longer personal for me, and yet I can’t help but recall my own career in teaching as non-tenure-track labor in higher ed and knowing that from the administrative perspective, no matter the quality of my work, my dedication to helping students learn, my belief in the mission, I was clearly, irrevocably, fungible.

I’ve been made to understand that there is a trust deficit in higher education. Perhaps the leading institutions of the world, like Harvard, can investigate these actions as a possible source of the decline in trust.

Escaping this dynamic turned out fine for me—better than fine, really—and it will be fine for Jane Rosenzweig, too. Someone with her background, skills and experience should be snapped up by anyone with a genuine interest in bridging the gaps between high school instruction and what happens when students get to college. She has the deep wisdom that can only be earned through doing.

But make no mistake, even when you land on your feet, when you see the same rank stupidity harming this work you so passionately believe in—engaging young people in the experience of learning—some of that old ire will flare.

Yeah, it’s official. I’m disgusted.