ARMAGEDDON

Yesterday, in commenting on a suggestion which was advanced in a council of the Economics department, the CRIMSON opposed the idea that the Tutorial System is a proper item for budgetary economy. There has been complaint, perhaps justifiable, that in this manner the CRIMSON singled out the Economics department for especial criticism. Such was not the editorial's intent, it was the department of History which gave Harvard's tutorial system birth; the division of History, Government, and Economics has taken the lead in encouraging its growth: today, the officers of this division are the most outspoken opponents of the movement to halt that growth, even temporarily, by financial restriction. It is clear that no sensible man can overlook this record. But it is equally clear that he cannot overlook the significance of the intrusion of a contrary note into the discussions of this particular department. For that intrusion must be interpreted as bringing to a head all the strong sentiment against the tutorial system, and against its natural and logical rise into the dominating position in the academic machine.

To appreciate the seriousness of this issue it will be necessary to examine the peculiar background of the tutorial system in Harvard College. That Harvard began as a school for ministers is a fact which has larger implications than is commonly recognized. It meant that Harvard should follow the rigid course curriculum of the scholastic colleges of Europe, a curriculum which is admirably adapted to an educational process of a very special kind. That process is based on the assumption that there is one truth, moulding and informing all studies, and that it can be taught as a unified whole through a series of correct answers which dovetail with a series of questions. These colleges served the purpose of preparation for the vocational training of the universities. In England the pattern was changed, as other things were changed, by the impact of the Reformation; the universities became bundles of colleges, where wider intellectual curiosity was educated by tutors and reading rather than by a regular journey over a number of fixed bodies of fact.

The American University, following the impress of Harvard, grow up as a single scholastic college to which graduate and vocational schools soon attached themselves. At Harvard the college itself remained a college of liberal arts, and when its intellectual interests grew it burst the thongs of a prescribed, regular curriculum to run amok in an elective system which soon threatened the liberality of its standards in an avalanche of vocational courses, and in the graduation of men whose college career became a very limited and illiberal thing. To this Mr. Lowell became heir in 1909; from the first he announced his intention to prune the excesses of the elective system, to set up requirements of concentration and distribution which should be correlated by tutors, and capped by a general examination. The solution was the British one; soon it became obvious that the college must be broken up into smaller and more manageable units, that the internal structure of Harvard College should duplicate that of the bundle universities of England. Yale, more explicit, called these units colleges; Harvard was content to call them Houses. Having begun the work of education along the lines that a diverse modern civilization made necessary, Mr. Lowell retired, trusting that the course system would gradually give way, and become, as the lecture system, the efficient handmaid of men working, under tutors, in a wide and coordinated field.

Perhaps the change was too revolutionary; perhaps the United States had no secondary schools which could feed a college of this kind. But revolutionary changes are adjusted by time, and even secondary schools can be taught to improve. A more persistent enemy lies in the conviction that there was something holy and inviolable in the concept of course credits, in the idea that a college should award its degree on the basis of separate goals achieved, and the achievement recorded. To this conviction is linked an idea incomprehensible to the European, the idea that the college should police the minds of its undergraduates, perpetually making trivial demand upon their time, perpetually demanding that Tuesday, or at least next Tuesday, should make the proper entry on the quality of Monday's effort. For it is very easy to do this, and it is very difficult to frame examinations which index not the acquisition of fact, but the knowledge of a field.

The course system can grow side by side with this ideal of education so long as that ideal is in its infancy. In the beginning an abandonment of course credits might have meant formlessness and confusion. But as the tutorial system and the house plan mature they will produce a kind of undergraduate for whom the course method of instruction is both too elementary and too dogmatic, for the man who has learned to the stage where progress must come by asking questions, of men and of books, is not satisfied by an orderly and unilateral presentation. If the degree is awarded on general examination as well as on credits, one important step has been made. But only when the courses become series of lectures to which no one is bidden and on which all their auditors are independently examined, with the thoroughness which the relation between the subject matter and their own field would dictate, can the tutorial system come into its own. It will be urged that the efficiency of the college as a police officer would be materially lessened; one can only answer with complete gravity and complete contempt, that this is perfectly true.

Nothing is more important than that the College should decide whether the whole educational philosophy which the tutorial system embodies should be abandoned. This decision is upon the present administration. Those who have given themselves to the system are no longer content to play a subsidiary role, and that only at the option of the student. The student is perplexed by duties which seem to him conflicting; if he needs a scholarship, tutorial is an expensive luxury for which there is no reward. Everywhere, in the rank list, in the general cum laude, the dominance of course credit is subtly emphasized. Now that the budget has become a sharp issue with the University, the tutorial system tend to stand more and more at odds with the course system. It is this which gives the suggestion to restrict it so great an importance; it is this which calls for decisiveness and leadership, for the stake is a crucial one. It calls not for a minor adjustment between touchy and conflicting bureaucrats, but for a choice between two philosophies.