History Thesis Reform Flickers and Dies

"What is bugging people is inevitable in the structure of the University," one junior faculty member commented. "That is, that you have great men with incredible power over masses of graduate students and their careers."

Last Spring, eight tutors challenged the History Department's fabled conservatism with a fistful of reform proposals, including a system of senior seminars as alternatives to the thesis. The seminars alone were enough to make the reforms revolutionary; at Harvard, writing a thesis for honors is usually thought of as the scholastic bar mitzvah.

But when the committee that studied the proposals reported back to the Department in October, it recommended a change that the tutors had not even mentioned: the installation of junior general examinations. The irrelevance of output to input gave the episode a slightly comic flavor, as though the reformers had slammed a door at one end of a room and a picture had fallen off the wall at the other end.

What happened, however, becomes more comprehensible if the affair is regarded as a case study in academic politics. As in any politics the fate of a proposal depends not only on what its substance is, but on who does the proposing. The sponsors of the senior seminar plan were drawn from the Department's virtually powerless junior faculty, while the men who came up with the idea of junior generals were all established senior faculty members. Small wonder, then, that the tutors' initiative took a form that they had never intended.

When several history tutors in Winthrop House began talking last Spring about changing the Department's honors program and tutorial, they found they were discontented for different reasons. One faction wanted to make the honors program smaller and more selective by weeding out those seniors who had little to gain from writing a thesis. Since the Gill Plan was passed by the Faculty in 1961, loosening requirements for honors, the number of honors candidates in History had climbed upward sharply. The year before the Gill Plan went into effect, 53 per cent of History seniors were admitted to the honors program: in 1965-66, that figure had risen to 72 per cent. "A lot of my seniors couldn't handle the thesis and were killing themselves for no reason," said one tutor. "They couldn't conceive it, they couldn't organize it and they couldn't execute it."

But other tutors in the original group had what one called more "teacherly" reasons for dissatisfaction. They complained they felt helpless in a senior tutorial situation that forced them to supervise theses on topics unfamiliar to them. After a few meetings, the tutee often knew more about his topic than his tutor did, and the tutors felt they were reduced to mere technical supervision, unable to contribute very much to the undergraduate's effort. Also, they were looking for a way to teach rather than simply to tutor, an arrangement that would allow them to take a more creative role by thinking through a single historical period and then testing their ideas in a seminar of several undergraduates.

Eight tutors finally crystallized their complaints into a set of proposals. They evolved a plan to combine sophomore and junior tutorials into one two-year course, but eventually abandoned that in favor of a request to make sophomore tutorial more specialized and to abolish the sophomore essay.

Meanwhile they remained firmly committed to two other, more controversial reforms. One was to hike the minimum rank listing for an honors senior to Group III from Group IV, in order to filter out the less able thesis writers. The other was to establish a system of senior seminars as an alternative to the thesis. Each six to eight-person seminar would be led by a tutor and would be concentrated on a specific subject, such as the Progressive Era in America. Each participant would write a 40-page paper -- about half the length of a standard History thesis -- and would receive some form of Departmental honors. Some tutors in the Department were convinced that the seminar would eventually become more popular than the thesis. At the least, the seminars were designed to bring together seniors and tutors with parallel interests and to satisfy the tutors' itch to teach.

Armed with what one member of the group called "a surprising unanimity" among the junior faculty, the eight took their proposals before the Board of Tutors in April, and to the full Department in May. But at the Department meeting, the reform movement hit a snag. Oscar Handlin, chairman of the Department, shelved the proposals without letting any of them come to a vote and announced that he would set up a committee to study the issues the tutors had raised.

Some tutors grumbled about Handlin's tactic, but he quickly set up the promised five-man committee with himself as chairman. The other committee members were, like Handlin, all prominent senior members of the Department: Giles Constable, Elliott Perkins, David E. Owen, and Bernard Bailyn. The eight tutors had one meeting with the committee before the academic year ended in June. "We talked quite openly about what was going on," said one, "and reached a sort of agreement about sophomores." But the question or honors remained undecided, particularly whether the senior seminars would be used as equal substitutes for the thesis or as a program for seniors not good enough to get into honors.

But by the Fall, the committee had come up with something quite different from the original proposals. It duly recommended that the sophomore essay be abolished and endorsed "flexibility" in sophomore tutorial, but the senior seminar concept and the new grade requirements had disappeared. Instead, the committee injected a proposal all its own: junior generals.

The recommendations were presented to a Departmental meeting in October, then to a meeting of the tutors, and were finally passed at another Department meeting later that month with only the senior faculty voting. Along with the substantive changes, the Department approved a motion "to reaffirm the requirement of a senior thesis for an honors degree in history."

Where did the junior generals come from and what would they do? The tutors didn't seem to know. There was some speculation that the exams might be used to screen juniors applying for the honors program, but both Perkins and Donald H. Fleming, who replaced Handlin as chairman of the Department for 1966-67, said the junior generals probably would not reduce the number of honors candidates.

Handlin later explained that the exams would eliminate the "very small minority" of honors applicants who would not profit from writing a thesis, and would test a student's entire knowledge of his field in a comprehensive way. "It seemed reasonable that since you were eliminating one requirement (the sophomore essay), it made room for another," he added.

What is striking about the entire chain of events is the lack of control the initiators of the discussion--the eight tutors and their sympathizers on the junior faculty--seem to have had over the final outcome. The tutors literally started something they could not finish.

There are a number of reasons for the junior faculty's impotence in determining Departmental policy. "What is bugging people is inevitable in the structure of the University," one junior faculty member commented. "That is, that you have great men with incredible power over masses of graduate students and their careers." A tutor who aspires to a post at another college after receiving his degree must depend heavily on the recommendation of senior faculty members at Harvard.

And because very few of the junior faculty members ever wind up with good positions on the Harvard faculty, there is a rapid turnover of ambitious young men that quickly erodes any attempt at a sustained reform movement. "At Harvard you don't go that far that fast, and you don't get the feeling that it's your department," said one History tutor. "You're going to leave--not get fired, you're going to want to leave."

The eight tutors who proposed the reforms last Spring are a case in point. Two are now at other colleges, one is in Europe, and one is at the School of Education. "The leadership's sort of gone," a member of the group observed.

The knowledge that junior faculty stays at Harvard are likely to be short breeds a grudging sympathy with the senior men's position, even among the reformers themselves. "Hell," one said, "the senior people are the ones who have to live with the system after we leave."

Underlying the disproportionate power of the two groups involved in the discussion was a real lack of communication. Neither side seemed to completely understand what motivated the other to action.

The tutors apparently underestimated the strength of the senior faculty's commitment to the thesis as an educational instrument. "The senior faculty feels very strongly that the thesis is the backbone of the entire program," said one tutor. The thesis is invaluable as "a pedagogical tool," said Gordon S. Wood, the Department's assistant senior tutor, which "gives the student the best understanding of the nature of history that he will get in four years here." The senior seminar would have bypassed the thesis, and there were also financial difficulties in setting up a large seminar program.

Also, Handlin said, the sentiment of the Department has always been against any limitation on the number of people writing theses. The presumption, he said, has been that anyone who is good enough to get into Harvard is good enough to do a thesis.

But the senior faculty treated the tutors' proposals as something selfishly of the tutors, for the tutors and by the tutors. They neglected the "teacherly" motivations for reforms such as the senior seminar. Fleming spoke of the tutors' trying to "unload" thesis writers into the seminars, and Handlin asserted that, all things being equal, no undergraduate would opt for the senior seminars, and some people might have to be forced into the program.

Handlin apparently drew his conclusions about undergraduate sentiment from a series of meetings with History concentrators held last May at the suggestion of the Harvard Policy Committee. But the undergraduates were chosen by the Department and not by the HPC, and their mandate, if any, was not clear.

"Some people thought he used the meeting to say the students favored his point of view against the teaching fellows," said an HPC member. "Handlin interpreted the meeting one way and others interpreted it another way."

In any case, the impetus for change in the History Department is largely gone, at least among the junior faculty. Discontent no longer seems to be focused as it was in the Spring, though there is still talk of instituting senior seminars in some supplementary, non-honors role.

Perhaps the junior faculty's weakness in affecting Department policy is structural. As one assistant professor said, "No matter how warm, humane and lovable the people in power are, the junior people are going to feel persecuted in some way."

But the fate of the last reform movement has done little to sooth the junior faculty's feelings. "We just wanted to take part," said one of the original eight. The tutors, he said, hoped for the assurance of "a voice--or at least that you'd be listened to. You want to be given a sense of responsibility, and this is what the History Department has failed to give to its junior faculty."