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While harsh and sometimes cruel, student judgments do not necessarily downgrade the taskmasters. Slate contends that Assistant English Professor Joseph Kramer is "a hard grader and expects a lot from his students," yet gives him an A rating for his "perceptive and stimulating presentation of Shakespeare." Good teachers often rate student raves. The American University guide calls English Instructor Peter Scott "great, dynamic, interesting, interested, alert and careful when grading, the most valuable and worthy freshman English teacher at A.U." In general, the student judgments tend to be fair. "Students have a marvelous, ironic ability to see through bull," says Vincent Scully.
Scores of colleges now have "good teacher" awards, including cash gifts of up to $1,000, to stimulate better teaching. Many are attacking the problem by curriculum changes, more tutorials and independent study under faculty supervision, the creation of clusters of small colleges within big institutions.
"And I Said to Albert." A perennial debate among professors is whether subject or student comes first—and the verdict usually favors those who stress the subject. Harvard Biologist George Wald, 59, shows why. As a researcher, he has made one of the most enlightening finds of recent decades: his discovery of the Vitamin A molecule in the retina goes a long way toward explaining the physiology of eyesight. Light, it seems, makes this crooked molecule straighten out and signal the optic nerve. The very originality of such work also makes Wald a frontiers-of-research lecturer, and his "Nat Sci 5," in the Harvard Crimson's judgment, is "one of Harvard's truly great courses."
Some 400 students pack his lectures, spill into the aisles, seem mesmerized for the hour. He begins in a whisper to force silence, raises his voice to make a point, then stares "with a kind of eye that burns right through you," as one auditor puts it, while the point sinks home. With crystal clarity and obvious joy at a neat explanation, Wald carries his students from protons in the fall to living organisms in the spring, ends most lectures with some philosophical peroration on the wonder of it all.
He tries, Wald says, to make it "a happy course." Notorious for name-dropping, he tosses in references to "and then I said to Einstein, 'But Albert . . .' "—and his audience, as on cue, hisses in chorus. Wald pretends to ignore this, actually loves it. "He isn't really teaching," says Freshman Tom Zanna. "He's inspiring." Radcliffe English Major Valerie Rough says she is "spiritually majoring in biology" because Wald makes it "so esthetically appealing." Harvard Dean of Arts and Sciences Franklin Ford says Wald generates an "amazing quality of intellectual excitement."