The Honors Major Sweepstakes

The first day of his freshman year, John Norwalk asked his two roommates what they intended to major in. Government, said one; Philosophy, said the other. "I intend to major in History and Lit," said John.

Norwalk seemed an excellent candidate: good prep school, good grades, articulate conversation, and most of all an intense interest in American history that seemed perfectly fitted to the purposes of his intended major.

In spring of his first year, Norwalk joined scores of his classmates and trekked to the History and Lit office in Holyoke Center to have his interview, submit a representative paper, and hand in his application. His nerves frayed raw and his grades dropped while he waited to hear whether he had joined "the elite."

In spite of everything, he did not. Reapplication as a sophomore raised his hopes but not his finish in the History and Lit sweepstakes. Today he is a discontented History major and his once-promising academic career is something of a shambles.

John Norwalk is not a real name, but the case is a real one. And it is augmented by the hundreds of students here who have felt the frustration and the sting of rejection from a restricted major.

Six undergraduate concentrations at Harvard are restricted: Social Studies, History and Literature, History and Science, Visual and Environmental Studies, Folklore and Mythology, and Applied Mathematics. The oldest and largest, History and Lit, has about 180 concentrators; the smallest, Vis Stud, has about 85.

Vis Stud is the only real department of the six; the other five are degree-granting committees on instruction. Each consists principally of a Faculty committee drawing its members from other departments, a board of tutors who do most of the teaching, and an administrative office.

The six concentrations are all-honors majors, meaning everyone is expected to maintain above-average grades and to write a thesis. And all are selective, to one degree or another. While just over 150 students are entering these coveted majors each year, at least 200 are being rejected, even accounting for multiple applications.

Where did these six majors--and particularly the three interdisciplinary committees--come from, and what are they for? The standard explanation in each case is that particular groups of professors felt inquiry into a certain cross-disciplinary field would be profitable for undergraduates with a strong interest in that area.

But there are additional factors. Isabel G. MacCaffery, chairman of History and Lit, said last week that the major she oversees was formed as a way to surmount departmental boundaries, so that a limited number of students could study the interaction of history and literature in a particular country or time period.

Because these six concentrations offer more personal attention and faculty accessibility than the larger departments, they have attracted students repelled by the impersonality of the educational bureaucracy and by arbitrary concentration requirements.

Because the concentrations have decided to remain small and to restrict admission, earning a place in one of them has become a mark of prestige--and prestige seekers abound at Harvard.

Most of all, these six concentrations offer the sort of education many students came to Harvard to get and feel they cannot obtain within the established disciplines.

Despite the pressure of increasing applications, these fields have grown slowly in the past few years. One reason commonly cited is economics--because the honors majors give more individual and small group tutorials to their students than most departments, the cost in teaching fellow salaries is high, at a time when the overall supply of teaching fellows is dwindling. But economics, departmental heads admit, is not the prime factor.

A stronger pressure for limiting the interdisciplinary majors comes from entrenched faculty in the departments, whose first loyalty is to the departmental structure. Not only do they seem to feel threatened by the growth of fields outside the province of departmental control, but they also fear that if opened up, the honors majors would siphon off many more of their best students.

In the cases of Vis Stud and History and Science, limited facilities and personnel restrict the size of student enrollment. Robert Gardiner, chairman of Vis Stud, said these two factors are already in short supply in his department.

Everett I. Mendelsohn, chairman of History and Science, said that a major restriction on his field is the number of qualified tutors, most of whom come from the relatively small History of Science graduate department.

But the principle reason the majors are opposed to expansion has to do with their educational philosophy. Robert J. Kiely, dean of undergraduate education, summed up the case by saying that the Faculty feels students doing interdisciplinary work need close supervision, which they receive through departments that are small and personal.

"I like a department where I can still know everyone by name," Mendelsohn said. "We've gotten a little beyond that now, but I still think I know most of the seniors."

Undoubtedly, a lot of what even the most academic applicants look for in the honors majors is small size, and if Soc Stud were the size of Soc Rel, its attractiveness undoubtedly would be reduced. Opening them would destroy the atmosphere in which they thrive, say proponents of limited size.

"I don't know if there is any theoretical answer to whether people who pay to send their sons or daughters to Harvard should be assured they can do whatever they want," MacCaffery said. "Not everyone can be on the varsity football team, of course, There are many areas in the College where there is a choice between having things small and not having them at all."

But while the number of varsity football players is small, Harvard athletics in general are operated on a very open basis. By contrast, Harvard's educational system seems closed and stiff to far too many students.

For the John Norwalks who are rejected from the few fields where there are serious, organized attempts to overcome the impersonal educational atmosphere here, Harvard does provide a few alternatives. Special Studies, the tracking program in the English Department, and the joint majors program all accomodate part of the overflow from the honors concentrations.

In addition, the Faculty Council this week discussed the possibility of setting up a seventh honors major, in the field of Comparative Religion, to be patterned after the existing six.

None of these measures, however, seems to answer the basic question: Is it right for some people to be granted the special privileges of the restricted majors while others, whom the concentrations admit are equally qualified, are excluded?

The concentrations claim it is, because they are serving people whose focus coincides with the major's, and they are therefore providing services that other people would not want or need. But despite the rigorous screening processes, far too many people seek out the honors concentrations not because of special interest but because they offer the educational atmosphere of closeness and personal attention so markedly absent almost everywhere else.

The fault then seems to lie not with the concentrations' desires to limit their benefits to those with an interest in the subject, but with the structure of Harvard education, in which departmental sovereignty and economic efficiency can outweight the educational interests of Harvard's primary consumers, its students.

"The way of increasing at Harvard the kind of thing that History and Lit does, if that's desirable, would not be to expand the existing groups," MacCaffery said, "but to hive off additional ones."

A large number of people who apply each year to one of the honors majors seem to feel that more of the kind of thing History and Lit does" would be very desirable. It would not only relieve some of the pressures on present honors majors, but would force the large departments to upgrade their educational system in order to keep their best students from transferring out.

In addition, it would eventually remove the aura of prestige from interdisciplinary studies and insure that only those truly interested in a subject will pursue it.

Harvard has decided that largelecture style education and bureaucratized departments are the key ways it wants to teach. The best and the brightest of the College are snatched off this educational treadmill by the honors majors and allowed to taste what a Harvard education ought really to be like.

The John Norwalks deserve better.