HKS Hierarchy and the (Un)answered Question
by Zachary Kushel, Opinions Asst. Editor on December 6, 2009 in Opinion
As Kennedy School students, we all should recognize how fortunate we are to study at such an intellectually rich institution. But respect and appreciation for our school must never yield to acquiescence, complacency, and blind faith. While it is wise to take counsel from our professors and at times defer to the administration, we also have a duty to remain vigilant and actively work to ensure our experience here meets our needs. After all, we are paying customers, and the product being sold is incredibly expensive.
The HKS curriculum does not set out to produce a chorus of ‘yes-men.’ Instead, this school seeks to churn out future leaders critical of power and the status quo and encourages its students to never take ‘no’ for an answer. In this spirit, it is essential to now pose an important question in this forum: how much of a priority is the student experience to this administration?
One would hope that the answer would be ‘pretty damn high.’ Yet, it is doubtful that this would be the response offered by many of you. Instead, it is likely one would hear complaints, many of them detailed in these pages over the course of this semester, about a lack of attention paid to student concerns.
Early praise should be given to KSSG President David Baumwoll MPP ’10 and his team, who have identified many of the issues that could be improved upon and have been working extremely hard to better student life at HKS. While the administration has largely been responsive to his efforts and displayed a willingness to work with and seek input from students, the length of Baumwoll’s recent Accountability Report distributed to the student body shows just how far the pendulum has swung away from students in recent years.
Second-year students, like those in previous classes, enjoyed ‘shopping days’ for courses so much that the administration decided to do away with them without formally consulting KSSG. They were replaced with scheduled sessions of ‘course previews’ that were so lambasted by the student body that they will be continued for the spring term.
The administration’s solution to the problem of already deficient student space was to take away even more room for students to make office space for an academic center. While the reasons and timeline that went into this decision have still have not been adequately explained, one can only hope that a donor was not accommodated at the expense of 1,000 students.
While the school has not gone paperless, the administration decided to eliminate mailboxes this academic year, managing to upset both green activists and radical students who might have the arcane desire to receive flyers, graded exams, newspapers, or course materials at some point during the semester.
This year, MPP1s were welcomed to the school with the logical decision to schedule an MPP1 core, required course to meet during the coveted 11:40 – 1:00 time slot on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This has effectively guaranteed a conflict with an entire category of events at the school.
Any MPP1 that came to the Kennedy School to focus on press, politics, and public policy or business and government, seeking to learn from some great visiting practitioners on these topics, has been unable to do so – the Shorenstein Center & Mossavar-Rahmani Center brown-bag lunches conflict with this core requirement. Clearly, had the student experience been a factor in scheduling, a core course would not have been put in that slot. One can only hope that the scheduling desires of faculty did not take precedence over the interests of students in this respect.
Now, activists in the MPP1 class, in coordination with the MPP1 class representatives, are lobbying the administration given their unilateral decision to schedule exemption exams for the spring core courses during the last week of this term’s classes – as if students were not busy enough with class work, other core requirements, and a host of extracurricular activities during that same period.
The exams are designed, the administration concedes, so that it is simply not possible to pass without sufficient preparation. Students are therefore left with two unappealing options: retool their Thanksgiving holiday break to prepare for up to three exams at the expense of time spent with one’s family, or spend the next semester taking courses already mastered in their undergraduate and professional careers.
Adhering to the current plan provides no tangible benefit for students; one can only hope that, by the time of this piece’s publication, greater sense has prevailed and the exams are moved back to January, when they were offered last year. But at a school where the registrar sends threatening emails to students promising to drop them from courses without a response from the student in sixty minutes, this author remains skeptical.
What is needed is for each and every one of you to get involved – here. Before saving the world, we need to start by rescuing the student experience at this institution by using our own voice at our own school. The KSSG could use you to serve in one of many advisory capacities that the administration has opened up to us.
If we do not take advantage of such offers, the administration will stop asking for our opinion. Where they have yet to ask for our opinion, we need to begin to offer it in an organized, intelligent manner. Only then will any of us have legitimacy walking out of here with a diploma and being able to truly make the case that, while here, we acted as constructive agents of change.
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