It's the night of the faculty dinner. After waiting outside of Annenberg with a couple friends, awkwardly looking for your professor, you gasp as you walk into the freshman dining hall: tablecloths, a room full of students and professors in suits, and dishes that include salmon and roast beef. This isn't your typical day at the 'berg.
No wonder the email read: "We recommend dressy attire for the dinner, similar to what you wore for Freshman Convocation."
But as you get your food and sit down with your professor to make awkward conversation, transitioning between class topics that you wish you'd studied up on and stories from his/her life, you start to think.
Why do we have to dress up to meet our professors? Sure, our professors are extremely accomplished and we should show them respect. Sure, the event is nice. Sure, we have office hours to talk to them. But when will we ever have the chance to interact with them in a non-academic setting?
In many ways, the premise of the faculty dinner -- making it a big occasion, a suit-and-tie event, to have dinner with your professor -- epitomizes exactly what's wrong with the relationship between students and professors at Harvard. Though we have the opportunity to have plenty of interaction with them academically, we generally do not have the chance to talk with them in a casual setting outside of the classroom.
Some may view this as a necessary evil that entails the professors' success and size of the college. With well over 600 undergraduates enrolled in Ec 10, why should we expect someone as famous as Mankiw to be able to talk to each and every one of us?
While there is truth to this, there's definitely room for improvement. The loss of interaction with professors in a less formal setting is the loss of a valuable role model, one who can demonstrate what life in academia might be after the College. This could very well be a reason why over 30 percent of the Class of 2014 pursue careers in finance/consulting, while a mere 6 percent pursue research/academia. (See "The Class of 2014 by the numbers".)
The administration is making attempts at improving this. For instance, a new program called "Classroom to Table" is aimed at fixing exactly this issue by inviting small groups of students and faculty members to dine together at restaurants throughout Harvard Square.
But outside of seminars, most students, especially freshmen in large introductory lecture classes, are yet to have any extensive interaction with professors outside the classroom/office. Harvard has a reputation for this, and unless the administration does more to amend this, the College will continue to be known for its subpar relations between undergraduates and faculty.
