FOR PERSONAL EDUCATION

In the Harvard Alumni Bulletin of March 26, Dr. Raphael Demos stresses the necessity of closer personal contact between professors and students. In doing so, he has voiced the greatest need of every freshman who, coming from a friendly preparatory school, is apt to find Harvard a vast cold place of fact and knowledge, where men are names and professors are far-away statues pedestaled on a lecture-room platform. In the mind of the newcomer there may arise the feeling that there is no one directly interested in him, no one to whom he can tie; he thinks himself a foundling on the doorstep of learning.

The administrators of the College have long realized the importance of personal contact between student and teacher, but as the college continued to grow and classes continued to increase proportionately, the problem became more perplexing. Individual members of the faculty have in many cases done all they could to meet the student more than half way. They have invited him to their houses and welcomed him on every possible occasion. In this way many students have been able to know as friends those who, to others, were cold lecturers in a crowded class room.

But at best, such friendly contacts are few. An ever growing number of undergraduates came to take it as part of the system that they should plod along with the numbing sense of intellectual loneliness in their hearts. To these, as well as to their more fortunate fellows, the infant tutorial system brought new hope. The promise of a new link between the students and the faculty was welcomed with enthusiasm, and though there is still much to be done to perfect the plan, in the main it is justifying itself. The personal element which Dr. Demos emphasizes as so important is beginning to creep back into Harvard life.