Harvard reviews how freshmen are advised By Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff, 1/2/2004 For freshmen starting at an elite university, the academic adviser is a selling point: ideally, a top professor who can guide the student's intellectual journey with expertise built over years of teaching. But for most freshmen at Harvard University, the reality looks far different. Upon arrival at one of the world's most famous institutions of higher learning, a student might be assigned an academic adviser who coaches the women's soccer team, works in the housing office, or serves as President Lawrence H. Summers' events planner. Most likely, however, he or she will be advised by a graduate student -- who may or may not understand the ins and outs of Harvard's undergraduate system. "I would have been better off having no [freshman] adviser at all and just guessing," said Todd Schulte, now a senior, whose freshman adviser was a Harvard Law School student who hadn't attended Harvard as an undergraduate. Schulte said his adviser's suggestions led him to take classes that were not appropriate for his interests and limited his choice of majors. "What she said was totally wrong." Already sensitive to Harvard's reputation as a place where undergraduates can't expect much personal attention from their high-powered professors, school officials have been stung by complaints about freshman advising, and are now considering an overhaul of the system as part of the university's exhaustive review of its undergraduate curriculum. Lisa Martin, a Harvard professor who co chairs one of the curriculum review committees, said it's clear the advising system isn't working. "A significant number of freshmen don't have advisers with a lot of academic experience," said Martin, who teaches in the government department. "We do OK with them socially, on what it means to be in college and live in the dorms. But on the curriculum side -- what courses and electives to take -- we need to do a better job." Harvard's heavy reliance on graduate students and non-academic staff to serve as freshman advisers is unusual among top universities. According to a review of information provided on university websites, Harvard is the only Ivy League university to assign graduate students as academic advisers to freshmen. Princeton, Cornell, and Dartmouth assign only faculty members, while others assign both professors and staff members. Yale University assigns each student to a professor or administrator, although its own curriculum review, completed last spring, argued that only teaching faculty should serve as advisers. Harvard's unusual roster of advisers is a product of a system where any "officer of the university" is eligible to advise -- an advanced degree is not a requirement, nor are teaching duties. "Officer" status is held by professors, graduate students who teach, and administrators in departments from dining services to maintenance. Beyond that, there is no particular rule dictating who is eligible to be an adviser, said Rory Browne, associate dean of freshmen, although he said the adviser should be "clued into the work of the community." Many librarians, members of the general counsel's office, and senior administrators volunteer, he said. As a result, some Harvard freshmen find themselves with advisers they would never have expected. When freshman Annie Riley got her roommate and adviser assignments in the mail over the summer, "I thought it was pretty hilarious that my academic adviser was a soccer coach," she said. Although some students would like to see a far more academic bent to the pool of advisers, reform is complicated by the fact that some of the most unusual-sounding advisers can be the most interesting. Freshman Robert Rogers says he is very happy with his adviser, Sharon Kennedy, a senior event planner who used to do a similar job for former first lady Hillary Clinton. Even though Kennedy is not an academic, she's "fascinating to talk to" about politics, said Rogers, who is interested in the topic. Senior Jordan Bar Am said his freshman adviser, a recent Harvard graduate whose day job was coordinating intramural sports, "completely changed my student experience" by telling him about a little-known sociology class on community organizing that helped him blossom as an activist. His activism has since taken him as far as Ethiopia, where he did an internship with Oxfam. Riley said her soccer-coach adviser Tim Wheaton, who has worked at Harvard for many years, was very attentive and supportive, adding that she's also able to get help from other sources, like the graduate student who lives in her freshman dorm. Still, "I would have liked to have someone who could sit with me more and say these are the good and bad things about this class," said Riley. Even if the system is totally overhauled, it is unlikely that students will be getting all their academic advice from faculty members. Assigning professors to all freshmen is "impossible, when you think about the numbers," Martin said, who pointed out that, with an undergraduate population of over 6,600, Harvard is larger than many peer institutions. Plus, many professors are resistant, because they are either too busy, or simply not interested in helping freshmen devise their schedules. Instead, Martin envisions recruiting a team of faculty members and "advanced graduate students," then giving them in-depth training on how to help freshmen navigate the various departments and the core curriculum. In exchange for a much heftier time commitment, professors might be excused from teaching one course a semester, and the graduate students might get paid, said Martin, emphasizing that changes are still in the discussion phase. Although academic advising is part of a long tradition, not everyone agrees on what the job of an adviser really is. Many students, like Riley, want the dirt on which classes are hot and which professors are boring. Others are looking for advice on how to balance out core requirements and electives. An adviser should be "an academic sounding board," not a hand-holder, said Browne. "A lot of freshmen want to be told what classes to take," he said. "But there's a danger in a word-of-mouth system where lore is passed down that `this is the cool class to take.' It becomes the law of the herd." Marcella Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.