Blames College, Not Cramer

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

In your issue of January 15, you published several articles and an editorial concerning commercial tutoring schools. I have read them carefully, and now, with all due respect to your good motives in assailing these lecherous harpies, these tentacled crutches, and these bugaboos, to keep them all from rising from the canvas, I should like to address to you a few observations on their subject.

Firstly, I cannot see that there is anything essentially wicked or "immoral," much less "lecherous," "vicious," and "insidious," in tutoring Harvard students professionally, or in receiving such tutoring. A tutoring school is neither an "intellectual brothel" (CRIMSON, 1939), nor an "intellectual gas-chamber" (CRIMSON 1948). It is simply an agency where a student may learn in a short time such superficial facts as are at a premium in his examinations.

You complain that a CRIMSON Editor was able to buy a B-plus in History 32 for twenty dollars. I agree with you that there is good reason for complaint. But you say that he bought his B-plus from Mr. Cramer, while all that he bought from Mr. Cramer was six hours of factual information. You neglect that the CRIMSON Editor then took his six hours of information to the Department of History, and they gave him a B-plus in return. Now, I contend that Mr. Cramer's transaction was a perfectly legal and honorable one, and that he is not to be slandered for it. The transaction of the History Department, on the other hand, is of a questionable nature.

His examination grade is supposedly an indication of the student's learning. If that indication is derived so indiscriminately as to reward a student who has worked six hours as much or more than one who has worked six weeks, I judge there is to be a fault in the method of deriving it. And I question such transactions as that of the CRIMSON Editor with the Department of History. I merely wish to say that one ought not to revile Mr. Cramer's successes, where with a little reason it will be plain that the failures of the examination system are accountable.

And if it be argued that my criticism of this system is ill taken, that is as much as to say that it samples accurately what each student knows, from which it follows that Mr. Cramer can teach a student more in six hours than he can learn from the Department of History in six weeks. In that event I should recommend that Mr. Cramer be hired on the spot to teach History 32.

On the other hand, if my criticism is admitted, I suggest simply that Mr. Cramer be left in peace. Harold P. Furth '51.