The Challenge, the Connection, the Transformation, and the Fun
A look at what it’s like to teach at the Extension School for 25 years
The memories of the beginning are foggy—a friend knew someone at the Extension School, a colleague made a recommendation, it just seemed like a good idea at the time—but after a quarter of a century one detail remains clear for each of this year’s 25-year faculty: it’s been an absolute pleasure to teach here.
Robert Benfari, Management Instructor
Robert Benfari, formerly a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, began teaching at the Extension School with the class Skills in Managing Conflict in Organizational Settings, and now also teaches The Assessment and Analysis of Your Management Style. The biggest challenge he’s faced over the last 25 years, he says, is staying abreast of what’s current and relevant in the field so he can best inform his students.
“The course may remain the same, but the content has to shift with the times,” Benfari says. To stay au courant he draws upon the latest research and information in the fields of behavioral psychology and science as well as his work as a business consultant. “There has been a huge amount in the movement of understanding how the brain works, so I have to swing with those [shifts],” he says.
As much as the content has changed, so too have the students at the Extension School. “Now you have people coming from all over the world, and you have to adjust to the cultural demands,” says Benfari. For example, in his management styles class he had to change from assigning a project at the end of term to an exam format. “Students want benchmarks,” he says.
Figuring out new solutions is a challenge that Benfari is more than equal to after all his experiences here and in his profession. “My role in life is to be an applied behavioral scientist,” he says, “and to work on projects that have to be solved.”
Frederick Bieber, Biological Sciences Instructor
Frederick Bieber, like Benfari and the other honorands, is an expert multitasker. As a well-known geneticist working at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he’s been the DNA expert in hundreds of legal cases, has been involved with identifying victims at the 9/11 site, and works as an associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School. Despite his full schedule, he always finds time to mentor, instruct, and connect with his Extension School students.
His devotion, in turn, has not gone unnoticed. “He is able to talk to a crowd of people as if he is talking to each person individually,” a former student wrote in a course evaluation. “He has a clear dedication to his students.”
Another wrote, “Dr. Bieber is extremely entertaining! His lectures are full of interesting information that keeps the class fully engaged.”
Bieber began his career at the Extension School teaching Elements of Human Genetics, a course now called Principles of Genetics, and has helped hundreds of his students move on to careers in medicine, law, and even the FBI.
Christine McCarthy, Expository Writing Instructor
Christine McCarthy, who teaches Editing Technical Prose, is quick to return any praise that her students give her. “It’s an amazing group of people that comes through here,” she says, and it’s because of those students that she has stayed for 25 years. “Teaching at the Extension School has been remarkably fulfilling for me. I’m constantly learning things as the result of [student] questions and their solutions to the problems I present. That’s been wonderful.”
Like Benfari, McCarthy has noticed how diverse the student body has become, and enjoys the challenge every year in getting her students to the point at which they start to make the perception shift from writing to editing and work with the language in a different way.
McCarthy has a unique ability to identify with her students who work in a variety of fields because she too has worked in many of those industries through freelance opportunities. She is now the publications manager for an architecture and engineering firm.
The connection she fosters often continues in unexpected ways. Some past students keep in touch via e-mail with grammar questions and debates, and McCarthy’s class in the fall of 2007 even got together for a small reunion. Another former student liked the class so well she sends her employees to it.
Classes, concludes McCarthy, are a gift to both the students and the teachers. “There are things that the Extension School offers to its students that you can’t get anywhere else. And being a part of that,” she says, “is pretty terrific.”
David Philips, Business Law Instructor
David Philips, who teaches The Law of Business Enterprises, too finds real value in the entire package that is the Extension School. “It’s a terrific student body, it’s a different way of teaching, I meet people I otherwise wouldn’t have met, and the support is terrific,” he says.
As a tenured professor of law at Northeastern University in Boston, Philips had to change his approach to his Extension School course and to teaching the law in general for the Extension School students. He explains most do not know the history of law and are not as familiar with the field as his law school students. This switching back and forth has proved enormously helpful. “When you teach in a different place it helps you to see and understand how you teach in the other context and to be a little bit more critical about it,” he says.
To find common ground and help his Extension students understand the ins and outs of law, “I like to put most of the subjects I discuss in both an intellectual and historical framework,” says Philips, because this helps students understand where the law has been, where it is now, and where it is going. “I feel that, to a great extent, I’m opening their eyes to something that they would not otherwise have seen.”
This is where the fun comes in, says Philips. “I love the students I get at Harvard Extension. Unlike the students I get at law school and my children, they laugh at my jokes.”