Steven Pfeiffer, Executive Director
Talent Identification Program

Hollace Selph, Director of Educational Programs
Talent Identification Program

Dear Dr Pfeiffer and Ms Selph

I see from TIP's 2002 catalogue that instruction in computer science has been entirely eliminated from TIP's curriculum. As a TIP alumnus and former TIP computer science instructor, I write to communicate my dismay at this loss.

While I did not intend to return to TIP in 2002, it had been my hope (and, I'll own, my assumption) that computer science at TIP would continue without me. It had seemed to me that I'd left TIP's computer science curriculum in a very good state: in less than four years, TIP had transformed its course offerings from a unfocused array of courses in which students learnt merely the syntax and semantics of various programming languages, to a rather more streamlined curriculum that unified the practice of computer science with the underlying mathematical theory and methods and even included an advanced course on algorithms.

The importance of this transformation cannot be understated. As I've discussed before, the difference between a theory-based course and a language-based course is analogous to the difference between a course in English literature and a course in English grammar: while the grammar course teaches a student how to represent a ready-made idea within a particular system of expression, the literature course teaches students how to think analytically, how to conceive their own ideas which can then find expression in any language. This distinction is often lost on high schools, where in most cases computer languages are taught as if they comprised all of computer science. This impoverishment of high school computer science is what makes it particularly important and appropriate for computer science to be taught at TIP. TIP aims to enrich students' educations with courses not available in their high schools; what better way to accomplish this goal than to give them a serious introduction to a subject that they otherwise would not see before reaching university?

It's clear that students in general liked the computer science courses. This past summer, for instance, thirteen of the fifteen students in Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science indicated on their evaluations that they liked the course's teaching style and accomplished a great deal. I really can't say it any better than the students themselves can, so let me quote one of them:

When I reflect on my experiences taking this course under Mr. Belmonte, I can say unequivocally that this course is unlike any I have ever taken. Mr. Belmonte attacked the course material with a palpable and enthusiastic passion. Refreshingly, this course focused almost exclusively on the theoretical material that is almost completely ignored in normal high-school level classes. The combination of interesting material, capable teaching, and a humblingly intelligent group of fellow classmates created an atmosphere in which I learned more over the course of three weeks than I have been able to teach myself in ten years of self-instruction. Mr. Belmonte takes pains to demonstrate the context and purpose of every one of the concepts taught; in the end, I was left with an appreciable store of new knowledge, an admiration for a field previously unknown to me, and an intense desire to know more. I would recommend this class to anyone who expresses even a flicker of interest in it; the subject matter is not simply the syntax of a programming language, but the larger problem of formalizing and manipulating those processes that come so naturally to the human mind. In this context, this course was thoroughly enjoyable.

Certainly there were computing courses that made greater use of computing facilities than did Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science, and in this context there may have been grounds for curtailing the use of computing facilities within individual courses, or for shrinking the number of courses offered. There is, however, a difference between shrinking the computer science curriculum and eliminating it. It is the same as the difference between pruning an overgrown but otherwise healthy tree, and hacking it off at the roots. (The only course that may come close to filling the resulting void is the new West Campus course on artificial intelligence. This specialised topic, however, won't give students an intensive introduction to the fundamentals of computer science.)

There was no shortage of staff qualified to teach computer science. With the exception of the short-lived Visual BASIC course, we've done a good job of filling the available positions through contacts in academia. As I wrote in my evaluation this past summer, I had prepared my TA to take over as instructor of Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science, and recommended him without reservation as a candidate for the position of instructor.

Given all these positive circumstances, I cannot understand what line of reasoning led to the summary cancellation of the entire slate of computer science courses. I do feel a proprietary attachment to TIP computer science, having put so much work over the past four years into making it the best it can be. To find out that TIP has done away with all that work, and to receive this news not by being consulted or informed personally, but by reading it in a catalogue --- frankly, it feels like a slap in the face.

I feel a great deal of personal loss and frustration in all this, but by far the biggest loss is that of the students who won't have the chance to learn any real computer science till after they finish high school. With a complete turnover of the upperclass student body every three years, and a high level of reliance on graduate student teaching staff who eventually move on to other things, TIP has a very short institutional memory. In hardly any time at all, very few people at TIP will remember that computer science courses were once offered -- and even fewer will remember anything about what was taught or how it was presented. I hope that TIP will reconsider its decision and plan to offer computer science in future years, before all the work that went into it has been lost.

Sincerely,
Matthew Belmonte
Research Affiliate, McLean Hospital Brain Imaging Center
Lecturer, MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies