Students Want To See More Faculty

It was one of those conclusions that should have been obvious from the start: Undergraduates are more frustrated by the lack of contact with tutors and faculty than by any other aspect of life in the Houses.

A two-year, $25,000 study, conducted by Dean K. Whitla and Dan C. Pinck of the Office of Instructional Research and Evaluation and released this week, also shows that food quality and security levels are not especially important to students in the Houses, but that equalizing sex ratios is.

All of these findings come from answers to a 19-page questionnaire that Whitla and Pinck circulated in the Houses in 1973, gathered and compiled shortly thereafter, and have been writing up ever since.

The 128-page report is full of historical context and even literary allusions--Tolstoy, Ford Madox Ford, Santayana and James Thurber all work their way into its pages--but its real meat remains the results of the questionnaires, which have been floating around the administration for several months.

There will probably not be any concrete changes coming as a result of the report; Whitla says he means it to serve as a "debating piece," not a basis for legislation. Unlike most Harvard reports, it makes no recommendations except that students and faculty should get together more, which in terms of controversiality is like saying people should write their parents more often.

The changes the report produces, if there are any, will not be immediate or especially concrete, but they are badly needed.