House Reform

WITHIN the next few days Dean Ford will announce that a faculty committee has been appointed to examine the state of the Houses. The news--seven or eight names and an explanation of their mandate--won't sound very exciting to most undergraduates. And the professors will probably conduct their deliberations inconspicuously, surfacing six months or a year later with a series of recommendations which the Faculty will promptly adopt.

Exciting event or not, the formation of this new committee (the first of its kind in 18 years) is significant--though the regular Committee on Houses and the special committee looking at the parietals question will absorb the conspicuous issues, this new body will have great power over the future shape of the House system.

The Committee will be looking for new administrative arrangements to fill two specific voids in House life--the alarming lack of contact between students and Senior Faculty associates and the absence of any system for handling the explosion in graduate school and fellowship applications in the last few years.

The stereotypical picture of a table of white-haired full professors, on display chatting with each other once a week but otherwise never seen in the House is as disturbing to most Masters as it is to students. "Without any doubt, this is our number one problem," one says.

WHEN the House system began almost all senior associates were tutoring a few students, and the Senior Faculty were easily integrated into House social life. Dean Glimp maintains that most are still anxious for contact with undergraduates, but find dining hall society intimidating--since they often know none of the students.

Beyond the social atmosphere are a series of purely logistical problems that keep the Senior Faculty away from the Houses. "Only four kinds of professors live in Cambridge," the axiom runs, "the young, the rich, the childless, and the emeritus." Most of the rest live in Belmont where the schools are better and housing is easier to find. It is difficult to lure these men back to Cambridge for House activities at night.

That leaves lunch, and even here the Houses don't have much to offer. "It's a long walk down from Littauer or the Bio Labs," one Master says; "the Faculty Club is closer and you can talk there with colleagues about whatever problem you're working on. The free meal at the House isn't much of a draw for these men--especially when it's something like cold Welsh rarebit."

The Dunlop Committee (formed last spring to make recommendations on the recruitment and retention of Faculty) has been examining Faculty residential patterns very closely and could recommend some long-range solution like University subsidized housing in Cambridge. In the mean-time, Richard T. Gill, Master of Leverett, has been setting off a chunk of the dining room each Monday noon for Senior Faculty and students to mingle at every opportunity and has been pressing both groups to show up.

The alternative to this informal pressure seems to be House courses. Everyone agrees they are a nifty mechanism for drawing Faculty down to the House, but House courses are in trouble educationally right now. Some of the Senior Faculty members who originally backed the idea are now questioning whether the experiment really works. With House courses under review, the Dunlop Committee still deliberating, and Gill's scheme still just a small experiment, there will be pressure on Ford's new committee to come up with some original ways of pulling Senior Faculty back to the Houses.

IN ADDITION, the committee will have to decide how Houses should be staffed to keep up with the mountains of paper work they now face. John Finley has called himself a shoehorn, and while no other Master enters the business of writing recommendations with his verve, it is agreed that moving students smoothly into whatever they will do the year after they graduate is a part of the Houses' job.

There also is little doubt that there's been a qauntum jump in the volume of this work in the last three or four years--partly because of the draft, partly too because students are a bit more alert to possibilities like VISTA or the Peace Corps. The present vogue is to apply to at least ten medical schools and House Masters find their desks piled high with requests for recommendations from alumni two or three years out of college.

A small group of Senior Faculty--maybe 50--end up writing a huge proportion of the grad school and fellowship recommendations, and some of Harvard's most popular professors complain privately of the amount of their time this process consumes. Finley worries that the prospect of writing so many letters scares some Faculty members away from accepting Masterships. Neglecting this unpleasant chore would be tempting, Gill says, except that the letters "happen to be terribly important. In an impersonal world, you can do a lot," Finley says, and Harvard has a record to prove it.

GETTING many more Senior Faculty members down to the Houses where they could get to know some students might take some of the pressure of writing recommendations off the Masters and Senior Tutors. But since that itself is so difficult a number of more immediate expedients are being discussed. Some Houses get pre-med and even pre-law advisors to help share the paper work burden, others find that men with no function but recommendation-writing have a hard time finding a place in the House. A couple of Houses have asked for an extra Assistant Senior Tutor on 1/5 time to process applications.

For several years, Finley has been pushing a scheme which would systematize the whole business. He wants each residential tutor to take responsibility for six or seven students in the House, much in the way Freshmen are assigned to advisors. Senior Faculty would act "as the Master Sergeants in this scheme," Finley says. He insists that Harvard has a responsibility "to deal honorably with everybody and send them off strongly," and that there is little prospect for the University's doing so unless the function is made official.

But Finley and other Masters who favor such plans as paying tutors for specified jobs instead of giving them free room and board advance their plans tentatively. They are sensitive to the conflict between formal arrangements which will extract the House's pound of flesh from its senior and junior associates and the goal of such schemes--energizing informal relationships. The most fascinating question before Ford's new committee will be whether structural changes are adequate to cure the ills of the Houses.

In addition to the problems discussed above the committee may get into the traditional issues like the inequalities between the Houses and the role students ought to have in making House rules (parietals!). Mainly, however, the work of the new committee is an attempt to reconstruct House life to solve equally vital long-term problems.