Comments on: Lectures

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 11 Aug 2003 15:59:28 +0000

Oh my. 250 was bigger than my graduating class. Two of my best undergrad classes – History of Intelligence in the 20th Century, and Religion & Fantasy – were also two of the largest, with about 35 students each. Had some great lecturers, and even at age 19 it’s a great motivator to know there’s no place to hide in a seminar of five or fewer students. But then I think that Sewanee might have considered Chicago’s ideas on education a bit newfangled and suspect.

By: 90210

90210 — Tue, 05 Aug 2003 03:42:16 +0000

We had teeny tiny classes at Harvard, I recall, but that’s probably because I was in the music department. I don’t see what’s so bad about the big ones. I enjoy sitting and listening to a really long train of thought, without people constantly butting in the way they do in seminar.

By: Doug Turnbull

Doug Turnbull — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 13:43:18 +0000

The compromise solution that we had at MIT, which I thought was pretty good, was to have 2 or 3 hours per week in the big lecture halls, where the professor covered all the basic material in lecture format. Then, you had “recitation sections” which would break the class down into small groups of 20 or so students. Dependingon the class, these would be taught either by a professor or by a grad student TA. These sections would give you individual attention, go over problems, take questions, and in the case of philosophy, provide for discussions of the issues. The only classes that weren’t structured like this were either advanced sci/eng classes that were already that small, and literature classes which were also small and were completely discussion oriented. It’s a trade-off. A lot of academics don’t like the current trend towards non-tenure track instructor positions, but if you want to educate large numbers of students, you either need lots of teachers (hence the cheap instructor types), or else you need to have more students per professor (large lectures.) Unless you’re Chicago, but they’ve always had queer, old fashioned ideas about education anyway…

By: john beer

john beer — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 04:31:10 +0000

Matt, Re: tiny philosophy classes, I always had the impression that Cavell’s Moral Perfectionism class, at least, was a big draw—is that a misconception?

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:54:34 +0000

Well, not counting things like Engine 1, chemistry, etc—the things that are huge everywhere—my recollection is that urban politics with Jim Morone—which I never took—was usually north of 200. Poli Sci 50 with Alan Zuckerman was over 150, as was Politics of the Legal System with Ed Beiser. I gather that Poli Sci 11, the intro to political theory now taught by my friend John Tomasi, has become a 200+ person course. One of the biggest electives was traditionally Engine 9 with Barrett Hazeltine—something about organizations. I don’t think any of my Philosophy classes at Brown was ever more than 50; but I had pretty few genuine discussion-seminars there. (One in poli sci, one in history, and one an independent course on the history of liberalism taught by Gregorian.) So, yeah, I’m glad to hear that the faculty expansion is going to allow the creation of more seminars. That said—I’m kidding, of course. Gordon Wood and Ed Beiser, in very different ways, showed me how much a great teacher can do with a big lecture format. And my upper-level undergrad classes mix lecture and discussion to varying degrees. I’m a big fan of our Core, and I think that it’s not good when too much of the social sciences/ humanities teaching is in truly massive lectures, but not everything needs to be a seminar.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:42:13 +0000

Well, it depends what you mean by big. We had about a 100 for intro logic, which is what Jacob seemed to regard as big. We have 200 for intro existentialism, then logic is our next biggest. I don’t know what the real heavy hitters are at Brown, but my impression is that they get many more students than that.

By: Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias — Thu, 31 Jul 2003 23:37:35 +0000

A big philosophy lecture? How odd. We had lots of big classes at Harvard, but they were almost all Government, Economics, Biology or something else that would either be useful for getting a job or else be really, really easy. The philosophy classes are all pretty small.

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Thu, 31 Jul 2003 22:13:18 +0000

I don’t know how widespread this term was in the States in the late 80’s, but at my school we called those mass undergrad lectures “cattle classes.” Usually the freshman core subjects were taught that way, even at my tiny jerkwater college.