Freshman Advisers

Of all the contacts a Harvard freshman makes, the person he is least likely to remember after four years is his adviser. After signing the study card in the fall, the adviser drifts out of the picture until February, when he sends his advisee a postcard notifying him that another study card is due. And that is usually the occasion of their last meeting.

In the past neither official nor academic Harvard has found anything amiss in this situation. According to the traditional view, the freshman should be left alone to fend for himself; take him in hand and you prevent his maturing. Apparently this line of thinking is going out of style, for the Freshman Dean's Office has effected this year the first major revision of the advising system since its inception.

Underlying the new scheme is the philosophy that the adviser should do more than just sign a study card. He should make himself more available to his advisee, be able to give advice on courses outside his own field, and be acquainted with such hazards of the first year as the famous November and January slumps.

The first part of the program aims at solving an old problem: the student will make no great effort to see his adviser if he has to go far to find him. This year there are 40 resident advisers instead of 33 (achieved by making all proctors act as advisers.) With 15 freshmen per adviser, about 100 more students have their advisers living in the Yard. But that still leaves half the class with non-resident advisers; what has been done here is to provide offices in the dormitory units for the non-residents. Unfortunately, as yet only 15 of the 99 non-residents are using the unit offices. Unless some of the remaining advisers can be encouraged to follow suit--and this will be difficult as most already hold office hours elsewhere--there will have been little real improvement.

The other reform was the consolidation of the 15 freshman dorms into five units, each under a senior adviser and his staff of advisers. The old loose supervision of the two assistant deans is gone; in its place are five more closely knit bodies whose main function is advising. Where the whole freshman advising staff used to meet once at the beginning of the year, the unit staffs are now holding monthly meetings.

The advantages of this set-up are obvious: the non-residents, now associated with particular units, are brought into closer contact with the Yard, and are able to trade opinions with resident advisers about advisees and across fields. In a Yard East meeting held last week, Professor Nash, a staff member, discussed the new Chemistry 11 program.

No doubt the advisers will profit from this close association. But the real problem is largely untouched. Advisers will still have only a superficial knowledge of fields outside their own, and all too often they will find themselves with advisees whom they are powerless to help. Every year, in fact, there are less advisers in science than potential science majors. As a result, the Freshman Dean's Office is forced to divine which of the entering freshmen are the bona fide scientists and which aren't. According to James H. Case III, senior adviser to Yard East, the diviners are often wrong. The other victims of this inadequate system are the freshmen "undecideds" and "changed my minds" who will frequently to told to "see someone in the department"--a lead which most freshmen are unlikely to follow.

Until serious drawbacks such as these can be removed, freshman advising will be far from ideal. Still, the new organization will lead to an increase in the meetings between adviser and advisee, which is crucial to the success of the system. While no miracles have taken place, the role of the Yard adviser will undoubtedly be extended beyond the ritual of signing the freshman study card.