Overseers See Need of Orderly System Of Promoting Brilliant Young Tutors

This is the first in the series of articles on the tutorial system written by the Overseers Committee to Visit Harvard College.

President Conant has announced that he intends to direct his most earnest and continuous thought to the problem of maintaining and strengthening the faculty. In his first annual report he outlined his objective in unequivocal terms. In his address before the Associated Harvard Clubs on May 12, he reiterated his purpose. "I am convinced," he said, "that it is possible to find enough men who combine the two qualities (scholarship and teaching ability) in the proportions which are necessary, and to this end I propose to bend every effort."

Needs New Blood

Now a Faculty can be strengthened only by the injection of new blood into its academic body. One way is to bring in distinguished scholars and teachers from other centers of learning. This method eliminates some of the incalculable risks of Faculty appointments since it makes possible the picking of "winners" after they have won, but it is no longer as dependable as it once was. As Dr. Frederick P. Keppel, president of the Carnegie Corporation, recently wrote, "Harvard is still 'princeps,' but no longer 'facile princeps"; and the story is current that at one of America's great universities it is considered the height of academic distinction to receive an invitation from Harvard--and to decline it. Without complacence Harvard can accept the compliment implied in this witticism. "We cannot ignore the fact," said President Conant in his annual report, "that it is increasingly difficult to attract from other universities and research institutes the out standing men whom we desire." Harvard must, as the President suggested, make academic life more attractive in Cambridge.

Promotion of Apprentices

This is one aspect of the Faculty problem, but there is another which also deserves attention. Some provision should be made for the orderly promotion of brilliant young scholars and teachers who are already connected with the University. In any healthy organization, channels should be kept open for the infusion of vigorous new blood at the bottom of the ranks. At Harvard the corps of tutors consists for the most part of younger men serving their apprenticeship in academic life. Harvard is particularly fortunate in having such a body of reserves to draw upon. For various reasons, however, the University has been slow to take advantage of this special opportunity.

A recurrent criticism of the tutorial system has been that the tutors are too young, and that the turnover among them is too large. The average tutor spends several years learning how to perform his functions; if he fails to secure promotion he goes elsewhere, and must be supplanted by an inexperienced younger man. Worse still, tutoring has often been relegated to graduate students who could give only a fractional part of their time and interest to it.

Rarely Considered Career

One obvious cause of these conditions has been lack of money; another is nor far to seek. Tutoring has too rarely been regarded, either by the University or by the tutors, as a career. Often it has been not been not even the doorway to a career. The pay has been inadequate, the work exacting and often exhausting, and the tutor knew that, no matter how well he might perform his task, his promotion to an assistant professorship would depend upon qualifications among which tutoring ability ought to be one of the most important, but that it would rarely be given due weight. If he was a good tutor, the fact would not be held against him, but neither would it count heavily in his favor. Consequently the young man who went into tutoring tended to look upon it only as a stop-gap an activity through which he would be able to keep in touch with the academic world until something better came his way.