Wabash Report Findings

The following are pulled directly out of the Wabash Report. They represent student quotes, faculty quotes, and summarized findings from the report.

However, a significant number of faculty thought that Harvey Mudd students had, over time, become less capable of, and less interested in, meeting the challenge of Mudd’s difficult curriculum. While it is not unusual for us to hear faculty lament “the decline in the quality of students,” what was unusual, in our experience, was that many students had heard and felt this sentiment from some of their faculty.

The students had also heard that they weren’t as good as Mudd students in the past because there are more women and underrepresented ethnic minorities at Mudd now. While some students brushed off these comments, others either resented them or took them to heart.

We heard, “Mudd students don’t seem to realize how good they are, and they don’t seem to take joy in their successes at Mudd.” In our work with over a hundred colleges and universities, we have never been asked to address a concern like this before. However, now that we have visited Harvey Mudd and talked with Mudd students, we see the concern as important and completely on target. Indeed, our conversations with students, and some faculty and staff, were among the most emotionally powerful and, too often, sad that we’ve ever had visiting an institution. We’ll start by reviewing what we heard from students and then reflect on what we heard from faculty.

Throughout our conversations we heard a kind of “focus-only-on-what’s-due-tomorrow” tunnel vision that students adopted to survive. On its own, the focus was admirable, and certainly useful to develop as a skill for emergency situations, but it’s not a strategy that is conducive to the kind of broad educational goals that Mudd describes for itself.

“You’re always thinking, ‘What’s the next thing to do?’”

“I have no extra time for anything really.”

“I know I’m not procrastinating because I don’t have the time. I worry that my shower takes too long.”

“I want to have time to go to the store, buy food, get a haircut, do laundry, but I can’t because anytime I spend doing that is time I’m spending not doing homework.”

“Usually I stop when everything is done for the next day, but there’s always more stuff to do.”

“If you get sick or you have mental health problems, everything goes out the window.”

“The presentation during orientation that talked about workload said that you ended up with two extra hours a day. And if you want to chat with a friend or go to a diversity workshop, you lose those hours.”

“I feel like I’m lying to prospective students sometimes. I feel like I should say, ‘Sometimes everything will come crashing down on your head, and you will hate it.’”

Almost all of the students talked about what they had sacrificed to stay at Mudd. Sometimes it was talking with friends, exercising, or taking care of personal things, and other times it was “giving up pieces of themselves,” including giving up a chance to practice their faith, their interest in things outside of science, volunteering for community service, playing an instrument, playing sports, or as some of them put it, giving up “some part of their identity.”

“Classes are so hard; I feel like I accomplished nothing.”

“I’m barely keeping up with my courses; I’m not good enough.”

“It feels horrible when I can’t take care of myself or my friends because I have so much to do.”

“Do I help a friend or do I get an hour of sleep?”

“If we want to change things and get a better work–life balance, the students will have to fight for it. And the irony is that we don’t have the time.”

“There was a moment when I said, ‘Wait, would I recommend Mudd to other people?’ and I realized I couldn’t answer that question, and it was really hard for me to realize this.”

“I had to abandon part of my identity to get through the workload. And these things are part of what makes you you.”

“‘Happy’ is not a common way of describing Mudd students.”

“There are no role models for students here. HMC seniors are burnt-out. They’re not inspiring students to develop good habits.”

“Students don’t have time to reflect or relax. Breaks are not a good thing. I asked one student who was struggling if I could walk him over to the Queer Resource Center and he said, ‘No, that’s 20 minutes that I need to use to focus on a problem set.’”

“There’s a question about ability vs. motivation. The demographics of our students have changed over time. I feel like our students are not as sold on a discipline in college. They come here and say, ‘I’ll do what they tell me.’ They’re not interested in science body and soul, and they don’t want to immerse themselves.”

“Students are different today. They don’t know how to fail; they’re coddled. Students are wedded to their phones.”

“I had to lower my standards to teach here. Students don’t know things that they should have learned in high school.”

“We’ve had admissions changes and no one has helped faculty understand how to deal with a more diverse student population. We get students with perfect ACT math scores who can’t pass our math placement tests. Because of the increased student diversity, students need more help.”

“Faculty are frustrated that students come to Mudd and don’t know the math that faculty think they should. Faculty say, ‘This is not the job I signed up for.’”

Unfortunately, for a number of faculty, their comments about the challenges they faced in the classroom, or the challenges to the Honor Code, focused on a decline in the quality of students rather than on how they were developing their teaching skills and demeanor so that they could continue to be effective in the face of a talented but evolving student body. As we heard these and other conversations, we wondered whether we were hearing something akin to the “I hate Congress, but my representative is great!” thinking that is prevalent in national politics. When some faculty spoke about Mudd students in general, they talked about declines in their students’ abilities, knowledge, and aptitude. But when they talked about particular Mudd students, even those who had struggled, they spoke with more generosity.

The difficulty is that students hear these negative comments not only from faculty but also from alumni. Many of the students we spoke to had heard the “Mudd-is-on-the-decline” story, and some students also referred to moments when faculty had said or done things that made them feel stupid or question whether they belonged at Harvey Mudd. Our sense is that these comments and behaviors came from a small subset of faculty, but unfortunately, many students were aware of or had experienced them. In one of the more heartbreaking moments of our visit, a female student of color agreed with the “We did it, why can’t you?” comments she’d heard from alumni saying, “But Mudd is adding women and trying to diversify. The Core is weaker now. We used to have four semesters of math, no room for electives, and more labs.”

“Some faculty are more approachable than others. I wanted to go to office hours and asked my professor where his office was. He said, ‘It’s in the syllabus, look it up.’ After that, I didn’t want to go to office hours anymore—it felt like he was saying that I’m stupid.”

“I feel like some professors don’t want to teach Core classes, like they feel they’re too basic, too low for them. Faculty will say, ‘This is simple, you should know this.’ If you try to talk to these faculty about things you don’t understand, they make it seem like it’s just obvious.”

“The tone of one of my professors is tough. I go to office hours and I feel like he’s saying, ‘You’re just a dumb-ass.’ I got used to it, but it doesn’t help a lot of students.”

“Some faculty, subsets of particular departments, think of grading in a certain way and grade very hard.”

“Students are angry about this course. They go to office hours and ask faculty for help. The faculty member asks if they did they reading, and when students say yes, the professor says, ‘Well, it’s in the reading.’ You ask faculty for help and they say no.”

“Faculty in Department X are hit or miss. The way they approach conversations can be a problem, like when they say, ‘Didn’t you learn this in high school?’ One professor made students in my class cry, and I was like, ‘Is this what college is going to be like?’”

“I went to office hours and as the professor was walking me through a problem, he made a mistake and couldn’t finish it. Then he said, ‘Well, the rest is just math.’ That wasn’t helpful.”

“I’m angry at Department X. They provide negative motivation to learn.”

“Failure is a tricky thing here. You can get on the bad side of an instructor, a major, a department. You might choose another major because of this. Failure is dangerous for students. Faculty are not always as generous as we could be; we don’t always see failure as formative.”

“We celebrate people who know exactly what they’re doing, and students are hungry for examples of more circuitous paths. Scientific practices reinforce notions of certainty—the meandering, circuitous nature of science has been written out of the books. Summer research is the only place where students learn this, and it’s still hard for them to deal with failure then.”

We were surprised to hear how carefully many departments monitored the amount of time that students spent doing homework in their classes, and how quickly they increased the workload to ensure that students focused enough attention on the department’s classes.

“The pressures students feel from the workload are putting pressures on the Honor Code. HMC has an oppressive curriculum.”

“The workload and Honor Code violations are intertwined—you can’t separate them.”

“What are the consequences if a student violates the Honor Code here? It’s student-administered, and students have a hard time throwing the book at their peers. More students should be kicked out of college for Honor Code violations. Students at other colleges don’t have a hard time kicking their peers out, but ours do. Why won’t our students do this? We’re behind the curve here.”

Why don’t Harvey Mudd students appreciate their own growth and success in a challenging curriculum? The answer seems to be simple. They struggle in a curriculum that not only is intellectually demanding, but also creates so much work that the best these incredibly bright, ambitious students can do across their courses is “okay.” Focusing on one or two courses in which to excel means doing poorly in their other courses, unless those are HSA courses, which they treat as relief valves. So, accomplished students are consistently falling short of their desire to be excellent. As their confidence wanes and as they begin to doubt themselves, they hear, “You should’ve learned that in high school” or “That’s so basic, you should get that.” Hearing these comments from faculty whose opinions they revere, even if it’s only a few faculty, confirms their doubts. Under these conditions, not appreciating your own growth and success is a rational response. If nothing else changes, students would benefit if more of the faculty, especially those teaching in the Core, blended being both demanding and supportive, as well as tough and willing to work with the talent they have.

Contact: muddistoxic@gmail.com