FRATERNITY TUTORS

Perhaps the most significant recent development in American colleges is the widespread attempt to adopt the tutorial system. Pioneering work in various Eastern colleges has stimulated the interest of other schools. Recently, the attempt has been made to introduce the tutor into the fraternity system. Already applied at Minnesota, and Oklahoma, this plan has now been taken up by Lafayette College, with the active support of the faculty.

The extra financial burden which the tutorial system causes has been one of the chief impediments to its spread. Harvard's large-scale revision of its educational system to make way for the tutor could hardly be widely imitated by other colleges. Nor should it be, for in such cases a gradual evolution is better than a forced transition. For many colleges, existent fraternity groups provide a special opportunity for gradual experiment and adaption.

The fact that the fraternities themselves are encouraging the introduction of tutors in their houses indicates a changed attitude on their part. It can hardlly be gainsaid that in the past the fraternity has often been superfluous from the strictly educational point of view. Its social functions have tended either to ignore or impede the proper work of the colleges, so that to the average dean fraternities have been objects of toleration rather than causes of complacency. And the era of gold-brick prosperity did little to retard their centrifugal tendencies.

Under such unfavorable circumstances, the prospective tutor might easily degenerate into an assistant in cramming, and usurp the function of the two or three "grinds" which fraternities annually chose for strictly pragmatic purposes. Such an outcome would be a travesty on the genuine tutorial system.