Editorial: Minimizing precepts

But Nassau Hall’s recent decision to strictly enforce the policy that precepts should have no fewer than 12 students is jeopardizing the quality of precepts. The policy sets a high quota, which has proven to be inflexible and unwieldy so far this semester, and has caused problems for students, graduate preceptors and professors alike.

The requirement has resulted in the reshuffling of students among precepts, as professors attempt to create and maintain precepts of a teachable size. Since precepts with fewer than of 12 students have been cancelled in some courses, many students have been forced to switch precepts. In some cases, students have even been forced to drop classes because the remaining precepts conflict with other courses. While this could happen for any student at any time, there has been a significant increase in these conflicts since September. Many of the affected students have already forgone other opportunities — like the chance to be in a popular seminar — to pursue their preferred schedule, and they now face significantly fewer course options after being ousted from a class by this bureaucratic requirement.

Enforcing lower-bound precept limits has also resulted in overcrowding. And though precepts are not supposed to have more than 16 students, even a precept with 15 students is too crowded to enable a discussion in which each student has ample opportunity to participate. Moreover, the academic experience afforded by a precept smaller than 12 students is highly desirable: Precepts should not render students anonymous the way lectures can.

Despite the negative effects this enforcement has already had, a clear justification for the change has not been articulated. In last week’s article in The Daily Princetonian, English professor Deborah Nord offered that “[it] goes without saying that this is part of the belt tightening. It’s not a kind of arbitrary decision to enforce the size rule. It’s a decision to reduce expenses.” Administrators have consistently maintained that the enforcement is not the product of budgetary concerns, but it is hard to imagine that finances — and the process of re-examining how money is spent at Princeton — didn’t figure into this newfound enforcement.

But even if economic concerns were involved, they would be an insufficient justification for sacrificing precept sizes that are conducive to high-quality learning and accommodating scheduling. Since there is evidence to suggest this decision is already negatively impacting the learning experience, the policy in its entirety ought to be reconsidered for next semester.