Harvard can’t restore academic rigor by burdening the staff who deliver it.
In the latest round of bargaining, Harvard Academic Workers-United Auto Workers, a union representing over 2,600 non-ladder faculty, remains at odds with the University over a proposed tradeoff: lifting time-caps in exchange for higher teaching loads.
Under this latest proposal, lecturers and preceptors, who now teach up to four and five classes, could instead be made to lead five and six classes per year, with preceptors facing an annual 30-student minimum. The union rejected the offer, arguing that the trade-off would erode teaching quality.
Granted, these are unusual times, and no interest group will emerge from this chapter of Harvard’s history unscathed. But if Harvard professes to prioritize academics, negotiations should be guided by one principle: preserve the breadth and quality of its academic offerings, not milk the faculty dry.
The University should propose higher teaching workloads only where scaling them is pedagogically plausible — and avoid doing so elsewhere.
In January 2025, the Classroom Social Compact Committee released a report establishing that students have lost focus on the centerpiece of the Harvard experience — the courses. That was followed by the Office of Undergraduate Education’s October report decrying grade inflation. Evidently, the University has made it its goal to reassert academic rigor.
That goal depends on teaching capacity, because instructors need the time to teach with rigor. But the demands on teaching aren’t uniform across the University, and neither are staffing realities.
In departments where there is a reliable flow of hirees or the teaching style is relatively standard, it may be fair for the University to require preceptors to meet a minimum yearly threshold of students, given extraneous financial pressures on the University.
In a large introductory math course, for instance, the content and instruction are somewhat routine. While giving more responsibility to the same number of faculty in this case is not ideal, it is a justifiable way to compensate for cuts to teaching staff.
But in other classrooms, the proposed increase in teaching loads could severely hamper the quality of instruction. In tutorials, for example, individualized attention is a foundational element of pedagogy — and often tutorial leaders serve as close mentors for students as they pave their academic paths.
Instruction in these settings thrive on feedback: close reading, written comments, and intimate class sizes. More students means less of all three.
But at least most tutorials will survive — as for small language programs, time caps have already worsened staffing shortages caused by Harvard’s hiring freeze, leaving departments scrambling when faculty are forced to depart.
For these underwater programs, Harvard aims to replace a cruel time cap with an unfulfillable teaching load: 30 students per year.
Harvard’s proposed minimum makes sense only if a program can reasonably expect to enroll the necessary number of students. Some don’t, and no contract clause can conjure students prepared to study Yiddish or Armenian out of thin air. The minimum requirement would be impossible for preceptors to reach without stretching them beyond their field of expertise.
The University’s attempt to thrust a blanket clause onto non-ladder instructors undermines its own teaching mission. Harvard can’t enact its crusade to reinstill academic rigor without tempering its negotiation proposals.
If Harvard wants academics at the center, it has to stop treating teaching as peripheral.
This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.
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