Tutorial for All: I

A large part of Harvard education has become diseased. Over two thousand non-honors men in the five large departments of the College--History, Government, Economics, English, and Social Relations--see no more of any faculty member than the semi-annual study card signing. Many are not well enough acquainted with even one professor to ask for a character reference. "There is probably less personal contact between faculty and students than ever before," said the Committee on Educational Policy in its "Bender Report" last fall.

The situation has come about because much of the faculty worries first about research, graduaate school work, and outside projects, and last about undergraduate tutorial. Many senior professors in Economics spend their time outside of courses either in government work or in research. Top men in the Social Relations and English departments also emphasize research at the expense of tutorial. This preference for research over tutorial is natural enough, since a man's worth in the teaching profession is measured largely by his competence as a scholar. His tutoring ability counts for little. Unfortunately this concern over advancement carries into course teaching as well. New faculty members want to show their lecturing ability and often insist on teaching their full quota of half courses every year--again at the expense of tutorial.

The results are obvious. The course catalogue has grown thicker; faculty research projects have boomed; but the men ready and willing to give tutorial have been spread thinner and thinner.

The Committee on General Education faced this problem six years ago. With existing facilities, it reckoned, a successful upperclass tutorial program could include only about 40 percent of the College, rather than the 95 percent who had been tutored during the thirties. Samuel Eliot Morison, in his "Founding of Harvard College," commented on the student body:

"From her opening day, Harvard has included a large proportion of young men who had no professional intentions. They have been complained of by their more serious preceptors, these three hundred years. They have committed every sort of folly and extravagance. New colleges such as Amherst and Williams have been founded in order to provide a place where poor but pious youths could be educated for the ministry, uncontaminated by the 'rake-hells,' 'bloods,' and 'sports' of Harvard--"

It was clear that if 55 percent of the College was to quit tutorial, the rakehells, the bloods, and the sports would be the first to go. But in lopping off the less seriously, inclined students from tutorial, the Committee warned, "it is essential that we replace the advisory function of the tutor ... by an advisory system which will retain the same qualities."

Though many departments have experimented with non-honors advising since 1945, no adequate system has yet been found. "The heart of an effective advising program," says the Bender Report, "should be neither the deans nor the specialists (Bureau of Study Council, Hygiene Department, etc.), but faculty advisors so organized that they will have knowledge of the College and of their students and that they can and will maintain some kind of continuity of relationship with individual students--a relationship characterized by interest in the student's intellectual development, but at the same time sufficiently easy and personal to give the student the feeling of being known and valued by some member of the faculty."

There is no such program here today, but there is an undeniable need for one. Several faculty committees and the Student Council have proposed plans to extend tutorial to all non-honors concentrators in the five large departments. The faculty itself recently approved the principle of such a program unanimously. What remains now is to find the best of these plans and to solve the problems of staffing and financing it. These will be the subjects of Monday's and Tuesday's editorials on tutorial for all.