A Few Reflections on Teaching and Learning at the Extension School

Keynote Address Harvard Extension Alumni Banquet

by Dr. Ellsworth Lapham Fersch, 25-Year Honorand

Dr. Ellsworth Lapham Fersch

In the coldest February, after we finished a meal at the Craigie Street Bistrot and were about to leave, Mike Shinagel and I saw each other across the aisle, and he mentioned my and others' many years of service at the Extension School. He wondered if I'd give a talk at the annual banquet in conjunction with receiving a chair. That evening the food, wine, crisp night air, and chance meeting invaded my sleep. I dreamed about the chair, about receiving the Shinagel Lectureship in Extension (after all, he has listed some instructors as Distinguished Service Lecturers), then about all nine of us tonight receiving a 25-plus year lectureship. And, finally, as I awoke, I pictured Dean Shinagel occupying the Fersch Directorship of the Harvard Division of Continuing Education. Of course, as I later learned, the chair turns out to be a Harvard chair you sit in. But I'm here nonetheless!

A footnote while I'm on the topic of honors. Dean Shinagel has just announced in his state-of-Extension comments new programs and degrees that begin in the fall. While he didn't mention it, he did receive in April the Nolte Award for Extraordinary Leadership in Continuing Education. The award called him "visionary" and said he showed "how to create high-quality programs for adult learners." Well, I'm here to tell you how he does it. Some years ago, a few days before the new Certificate of Special Studies in Administration and Management [CSS] Program was to begin, I received a phone call--I think it was from Ray Comeau or maybe Mary Higgins--who said that the program needed an ethics course, and as a result my Law and Ethics course had been listed to satisfy that requirement. I said that nothing in my course dealt with administration and management, and whoever it was replied, "Well, you have a week." So I called the Coop and added a book, and enrollment in the course (which I had inherited not too long before) jumped from about 60 to more than 150 that fall. A few years later, as the CSS Program expanded and developed its own courses, my course was suddenly removed. Only the Coop was annoyed, left with books to return. I'm wondering if a week before school starts this fall I'll get one or more new calls. After all, the Dean has noted a significant number of new programs. So I'll be at the ready. As my example shows, one of the great joys of working in Extension is the need to remain flexible.

But that's true elsewhere as well. The chairman of the psychology department at Wheaton College, which had recently gone coed, asked if I'd teach a seminar there one spring to replace a faculty member on leave. He said it would be a nice change from my large courses in the Extension School. It would have about 12 students. Well, a couple of days before it was to begin, he called and said that the topic of law and psychology was so popular that more had signed up, so it would be an expanded seminar. When I asked how many, he said, "Oh, 100."

So Mike's visionary technique, I can say from experience, is to go for it, to see what there is a need for, to establish it, then to have flexible people who will help get the program off and running. And I should add one more matter, which you know anyway since you're at the Harvard Extension Alumni Banquet. The name Harvard has greatly helped Mike Shinagel with program development and, I might add, has helped all of us as well.

To prepare for my talk tonight, I read over my own evaluation comments from this year's Law and Ethics and Law and Psychology courses, and I'm amazed that many of the ones I chose, perhaps to read to you, are exactly the ones Dean Shinagel chose to use to introduce me. The good humor, the candid talk, the sometimes-odd take on things that students in Extension exhibit--they're there in the evaluation comments and I enjoy them, though I might dispute his characterization of my cult following. Of course, on second thought, I might not dispute it.

Further, to prepare for these remarks, I read through Extension School catalogues and was amazed at all the faculty's compliments to students--so laudatory, so rosy. After reading the squibs in various catalogues I decided that Harvard College can stop its current review of the undergraduate curriculum and take a lesson from the Extension School: get faculty who really like to teach, have students pay by the course so they'll appreciate each one they take, make the operation consumer friendly, and grant no tenure but prize longevity. The Extension School can show the way.

And tonight does prize longevity. One of those honored tonight is characterized by a student's comment in the catalogue: "One professor told me to take any class I could taught by Bruce Molay," whose classes are "fresh, interesting, and taught me a great deal of practical information." Another honoree, Joanna Bunker Rohrbaugh, says, "My students have always risen to the challenge of having fun while doing serious academic work." And still another, Donald Pfister, reports, "There are days when I think that I learn as much from my students as they learn from me." How interesting it would be to read through all nine instructors' evaluations as well.

In his instructions to me, Dean Shinagel said I should feature a few highlights and a few lowlights of my time teaching in Extension. So here are a few highlights: in Law and Ethics we were reading the court inquest (by a judge I knew well, had lent a relevant book to, and had discussed the religion in question with) and were watching a videotape in the case of an ill child whose devoutly religious parents had not sought medical treatment for him, when one of the students in the course said he had been the emergency medical technician who was the first to respond to the scene. His description of that scene [the child died] and his personal reflections illuminated the class and brought the issue even more dramatically to us all.

In Law and Psychology we were focusing on cases of battered women, and though I did not know it at the time, in the class was a woman who subsequently became a significant figure concerning that issue. Some years later I was at a conference and we were seated at round tables. As I talked, a woman at the next table tapped me on the shoulder and said she had recognized my voice. She had taken my course, had later graduated from the Extension School, then from Harvard Law School, and had become a spokesperson and advocate for women in situations like the one she had once been in herself. I asked her what she had thought as she took the course those years ago, and we had a wonderful conversation about how she now saw the law and psychology considering what she had been through.

And a final and somewhat amusing highlight: as those of you know who have taken a course with me, I do embrace the adversary system of justice (and even, to an extent, of teaching) and am sometimes said (even by me) to assume the role of so-called devil's advocate. As it invariably happens, a student in a large course I was teaching [last] fall in the College took great exception to what I had said in class, to the fact that I could even articulate the (obviously wrong to her) position opposed to her own. She followed me from the classroom back toward my office at William James Hall and continued to berate me. In the hallway we met another faculty member with whom this student had taken a course. Well, that faculty member had decided, at an older age, to return to school to earn a master's in psychology, to apply (and to be accepted) to graduate school at Harvard, to earn her PhD in psychology, and to teach in the College. As we stood in the hallway, that former student in my Law and Psychology Extension course said to the current student in my Psychology and Law College course, "You know, I took a course from him some years ago and it got me started toward my PhD. Don't take what he says so personally. After all, you know he's also a lawyer!" Later, I was told by yet another student that the one who had followed me told him that my former Extension School student was the only member of the Psychology Department who was at all compassionate. I've now taken to saying that that was a result of my course in Extension those years ago.

And here are a few lowlights. One student in my Law and Psychology course came up to me after the second class meeting and said, "I want to take your course, but my family thinks I should enter a mental hospital. Which do you think I should do?" A bit surprised, I simply replied, "I don't know you at all and your family does. I'd postpone this course and follow their advice." The next week I got a call from him from a hospital. He said since I was also a lawyer would I represent him. I suggested he have his lawyer call me. I never heard from his lawyer, and as far as I know the student never took my course.

Some student evaluations are more confusing than enlightening. One of my favorite recent examples concerns my course website. As reported to me, students expressed split opinions, with 14 percent calling it poor and 14 percent calling it excellent, though 77 percent recognized that no website existed.

And because we're on the theme of longevity tonight . . . I've taught so long at the Extension School that when I changed from having invited guests speak to a class (they were of great interest but did bring problems with them, as one typical guest was a convicted murderer out on released time, under the old system, from the state's maximum security prison, and others were juveniles who had seriously injured an instructor in front of the Science Center) to showing videotapes, the audio-visual department had only VCRs that played the two-hour recording speed and I had recorded the tape at home in the six-hour mode. Their representative responded to my suggestion that they go to Lechmere where I had gotten my home VCR and get one for William James Hall by saying, "We can't because of Harvard bureaucracy." What a transformation in technology I've witnessed in the time I've been teaching here. And yet, the nine of us here tonight continue to enjoy, foster, and proclaim the value of direct contact between student and instructor.

Finally, I've been asked one question a lot: how does the Extension School compare to the College, to the Graduate School? I never give a simple reply here or elsewhere to what seems to be a question asking for a simple reply. Instead I say that I've taught a lot--at Northeastern, Yale, Boston University, U. Mass. in Boston and in Lowell, Wheaton, as well as at Harvard in the Medical School, the College, the Summer School, and the Extension School, and also in various courses for judges and probation officers, in motivation courses for adolescents, and in counseling with clients and patients. And I realize that all these places and courses are both the same and different. In all of them, some with more knowledge or experience share with others with less but at the same time have an opportunity to learn things as well. In that sense they're much the same. Yet in terms of the trappings and extras and co-curricular possibilities, the schools may be significantly different. And in terms of the interest and ability and dedication of the students, they can be different as well. But I always say, wherever I am, and repeat tonight: revel in what makes this place unique and of value, for as long as it serves those needs of yours at a price you can afford and you can take away more than you leave behind. I have been fortunate to have attended Yale and Berkeley and Harvard, and they've all offered unique perspectives, as does the Harvard Extension School.

In all my teaching and learning, as in my work as a practicing forensic psychologist, I've tried to balance acceptance with questioning, to realize that with all the knowledge you possess you still might suffer great harm (as did the informed local reporter who knew everything about cancer and treatment, yet who was killed by a mistake at a renowned Boston cancer center). Yet, as my courses, and my advice and testimony in legal and in clinical settings, try to do, I always hope we continue to learn from experience and to explore carefully all sides of issues even when one seems, at least at the present, to be accepted or preferable. And as we continue to examine critically ideas, feelings, and motivations, we continue to grow in that wisdom, which enhances us and others.

I conclude now, in hot and humid June, by returning to my dream from cold February. I'm here tonight to accept gladly on behalf of all nine of us long-time instructors in the Extension School our new designations as Shinagel Distinguished Lecturers in Extension, or is it Distinguished Shinagel Lecturers, and to be the first to congratulate the Dean on his Fersch Directorship of the Harvard Extension School. On behalf of all of us, I accept whatever chair and title come along with the chair to sit in. And I extend best wishes to everyone!