ACCELERATION

The voltage of the anti-tutoring campaign is mounting. Two new charges have been added within the last two days, as the Advocate and the Guardian have determined to stand with the Crimson. The significance of their decisions must be duly appreciated. Their abolition of tutoring advertisements is a follow-up on a similar blow with which the Crimson led off; and these blows alone can rock the tutoring schools to a limited extent. Advertising in respectable undergraduate publications has always gilded the schools with a coat of legitimacy. The masquerade is over when tutoring bureaus are no longer allowed to advertise.

But beyond this, the action of the two magazines is significant as symbolic of their sincere convictions. Both of them may have lean days because they have refused this tainted fat. Both have made a very real financial sacrifice, and neither stands to receive any tangible gains. Only an honest recoil from the disgusting tumor in the Square could have give stimulus to such a policy.

Such sacrifices demand recognition from the powers that be. If the repugnance of these publications is so great as to produce positive action, then the University, whose interest is infinitely greater, should be infinitely more willing to act.

The administration need not wait for a million dollars--Newsweek's estimate in a recent article--before it can go to battle. Harvard need not set up its own tutoring bureaus. In fact, the mere establishment of University-paid tutors who would compete with the Square tutors would be action of a shallow and temporizing sort, little capable of exterminating the vicious practices now extant. What Harvard must do is set up standards of legitimate tutoring, institute a strict supervision over private tutors, and force these to comply with her standards. And who fail to comply--and this would include the great majority of the tutors now in the Square--must be ruthlessly blacklisted, and students who frequent them must be placed on probation. This is action of an extreme sort, but the situation is extreme.

Everything now waits upon the University. Other publication may and should join the camp of the allies. But a general advance can be made only when the administration signifies its willingness to take steps in the direction outlined. It alone possesses the necessary power. Tutoring of the Square variety may very well be only a symptom of the student's attitude toward their work; and the most thorough-going solution may be a change in this attitude and a refusal to tutor. But such a solution is Utopian. It must give way to another more practical solution, which, while not as fundamental, is almost as effective. This solution, the only one possible, is direct frontal attack by the University.