Sections serve student needs

Pie in Your Face
    By Sheela V. Pai

During dinner about two weeks ago, I was reading the cover story, "Sending out an SOS: save our sections" [YH, 10/29/99], when I nearly choked on my grilled chicken, stunned by what I had just read. In the midst of a roundtable discussion about the teaching assistant (TA) shortage, with a number of prominent Yale professors and administrators scratching their heads figuring out ways to preserve sections, Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, dropped a bomb.

"Anybody who knows collegiate history knows that the lecture course with an hour seminar attached is a fairly modern convention," he said. "Instead of assuming that all sections are equally necessary, we should be asking: when are sections needed? What are they needed for?" As a senior history major whose Yale education has been enhanced by the existence of sections, let me answer that question.

Brodhead supports his argument by saying that, during his undergraduate years at Yale, all but two of his classes did not have sections. Some of his lectures lasted three hours and included a discussion led by the professor. But, since the late '60s, there have been dramatic changes in the Yale undergraduate population. The admission of women and of more minority students, along with a general trend of increased admits, have led to substantial increases in class size. In recent years, courses such as Professor John Gaddis' Cold War lecture have seen student enrollment increase well into the hundreds.

Keeping that in mind, along with the fact that the "three-hour class" is non-existent, it is unfair to burden professors further. Lecturers already must squeeze all the information they can into a brief 50- or 75-minute session; they cannot take on the additional responsibility of helping hundreds of students comprehend the lecture and reading material. In most cases, the "intimate lectures" of Dean Brodhead's undergraduate days are now logistically impossible. Sections are a "modern convention" because, years ago, in the face of increasing class sizes, professors were forced to decide whether to do a mediocre job of both lecturing about a topic and of helping students understand the material, or to share their insights while allowing capable TAs to give students the one-on-one help needed. The professors chose the latter option—the only one that was fair to students.

Perhaps Brodhead was trying to hint that only smaller lectures, such as Modern France, might not need sections. But after comparing my experiences in both that course, which has an optional section, and the Cold War course, which has a mandatory section, I can assure you that this is not a legitimate solution. Though there are only 120 students in Modern France—in comparison to the 300 in Cold War—the students in the latter class have a much better understanding of the material. The mandatory sections have forced Cold War students to keep up with the reading and to critically analyze the issues that are brought up in class every week. In contrast, the Modern France students—most of whom admittedly don't attend the optional section—have a much weaker sense of how to interpret the broad themes brought up in class and scrambled before the midterm to understand all of the course's material.

The answer to the section debate is not to shortchange students in certain classes based on class size. Yale can't use an outdated practice to solve a very recent problem. Though limiting sections to larger lectures may work for a short time, what does Yale College plan to do once the smaller, less popular courses inevitably experience an influx of students? Admittedly, the section problem is a tough one to crack. But the Administration must approach this issue responsibly as a long-term situation. Though eliminating sections may provide a quick fix to the problem, it would ultimately deprive Yalies of what Brodhead himself described as "enormously valuable educational experiences" for many students.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
NOTE: SITE WILL APPEAR IN A NEW BROWSER WINDOW

• It's time for a new UCS philosophy, 10/29/99
• Yale carpetbaggers keep out, 10/15/99
• At Yale, free speech hits a wall, 10/1/99

Back to Opinion...