An Open Letter to Dean Beth Mynatt and Senior Associate Dean Ben Hescott

I hope you are doing well. I have heard through the grapevine that Khoury is changing the CS curriculum. While this doesn’t affect me as an alumnus of the undergraduate program, and as a current PhD student, I am writing to let you know that I am deeply concerned about this change and would like to understand it. Equally concerning is the secrecy surrounding the entire process.

When I was an undergraduate at Khoury, it was still called CCIS. I enrolled in the “accelerated” section of CS2500, despite the email I received the summer before explicitly stating that there would be zero benefit to this section, except for my own intellectual growth. The course was taught by Dr. Felleisen. After taking this course, I joined the course staff for CS2500 for four semesters.

While I don’t always agree with Matthias, I have great respect for the curriculum that he designed. HTDP helped me to become a better programmer and thinker. I believe that it will be extremely difficult to design a new curriculum that induces the same level of logical thinking and attention to design. If the new curriculum is just “HTDP with Pyret instead of *SL” then I am okay with this change. However, I don’t want to see Northeastern’s CS program become yet another Python coding bootcamp.

When I was on the course staff, I had the privilege to watch first-year students progress from high schoolers that could, at best, hack together a script, to people who could design complex programs in a principled way. A conventional course will just teach the students how to hack together “better” scripts.

I understand that it may be an issue that professors at the global campuses don’t yet understand the curriculum, but there are better solutions to this problem than a complete overhaul. After all, each of the Boston professors who currently teach CS2500 had to learn to teach the curriculum at some point. For that matter, each of the graders and TAs need to develop a deep connection with the material. Every year, there is a member of the course staff that had just taken the course in the previous semester and could probably do a passable job of teaching the entire course by themselves. While consistency is always an admirable goal, it would be an error to let the lowest common denominator prevail.

I also understand that full transparency is difficult to achieve. However, the college is acting as if it has something to hide with this curriculum change. When the PhD curriculum was overhauled a few years ago, the administration held several town halls to engage stakeholders, seek input, and incorporate requests into the planned curriculum. All students received a draft of the curriculum, with a clear point of contact for any comments. Nobody could claim that the changed PhD curriculum came out of nowhere.

Please don’t let Khoury College make a mistake equal to when all the universities switched to C++ for their intro course several decades ago.

Regards,

Daniel

Addendum I sent essentially the above letter as an email, so I would like to preserve it as-is. But I would like to clarify the paragraph about professors at global campuses: I am not suggesting that TAs should teach the course in Oakland. Rather, that if a TA is able to gain a deep understanding of the course material in just one semester, then it is not unreasonable for Northeastern to invest the resources to train the professors in the global network. The “lowest common denominator” does not refer to a struggling student, but rather to a professor who is unwilling or unable to adopt the HTDP curriculum.