'Being Upset Might Make Some Sense'

It was the last day she could withdraw from her math course, and the sophomore was distraught by the prospect of a dismal grade.

"I had lost my confidence in my ability to do the work," said Jane P. Doe '88, who asked that her real name not be used. Following the lead of 750 students last year, Doe took her troubles to the Bureau of Study Counsel. She says that the professional counselor she talked to was "very understanding, very compassionate" and convinced her to stay in the course.

Doe now meets with a peer supervisor or tutor from the Bureau a few times a week. She says the Bureau has helped her regain her confidence and improve her academic performance.

"Professors are great but sometimes it helps to have someone who's more your own age," Doe says.

She says she would encourage other students to go to the Bureau. Students who don't go "don't want to be stigmatized, but what's worth more: my pride or the grade?" Doe asks.

The Bureau works to restore students' confidence in their abilities and helps them approach their studies more effectively. One-on-one counseling work is the Bureau's core activity, Acting Director Mack I. Davis II says. "It is a very special opportunity that Harvard offers."

Students are referred to the Bureau by a variety of sources, including senior tutors, senior advisers, housemasters, proctors, and University Health Services. But at least 58 percent of the Bureau's patrons tap its resources on their own initiative, according to a report prepared by the Bureau.

Davis oversees a staff of 10 counselors and four administrative assistants and an annual budget of more than $275,000 from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The staff also includes paid undergraduate peer tutors who work part time assisting students in their particular areas of difficulty.

The Bureau is "still the only office on campus that has a central listing of undergraduates that stand ready to help peers with academic work," Davis says. Last year, 359 students used the Bureau's peer tutoring services alone. The undergraduate tutors, known as Tutor Award Supervisors, are nominated by faculty members. They are closely supervised by the Bureau staff, Davis says. An additional corps of peer tutors remains on call.

The counselling staff is comprised of psychologists, former teachers, social workers and "people who are just interested in the college-age population," Davis says. There are no uniform training requirements for the counselors, but many of them have taken former Director of the Bureau Kiyo Morimoto's course at the Graduate School of Education: "Counseling: Its Psychological Assumptions and Their Expression."

Morimoto retired last June after 27 years with the Bureau. A search committee is currently in the process of finding a permanent replacement to succeed Davis, who is running the program in the interim.

"In a place where there is a disproportionately high number of talented and able students, the University would do a disservice not to help foster that creativity and expertise. We're dedicated to helping to do that fostering work," Davis says when asked what it was about Harvard that made the Bureau necessary.

Davis and Morimoto both say that the Bureau is a unique institution. "No other university has what we have at Harvard," says Morimoto. "Our whole effort is to try to understand how people learn."

Other colleges have counseling centers that deal in crisis management and require students to come forward with narrowly defined problems, Davis says. "We're unique in higher education. We're not a problem center. You can be making a B-plus in Math la and be troubled by one aspect of the course and still use the services of the Bureau," he said.

The Bureau sees the learning experience in academic, intellectual, and personal terms and "the lines between those categories are generally extremely thin," Davis said. The Bureau is unique in not forcing students to "rigidly define what the barriers are to their learning experience."

Davis says a successful counselor should enjoy working with students, have a "tremendous amount of energy" and be sensitive to rapid developmental changes. Counselors should have a natural ability "to not want to tell people what to do" and should be trained to work with the diverse population of students that uses the Bureau, Davis says.

The most rewarding aspect of counseling is to work with a student over four years "to watch the process of how someone finds themselves," said counselor M. Suzanne Repetto, who was appointed associate director of the Bureau last month.

The Bureau is like a "full-service" bank in the range of services it offers, Davis says. In addition to individual counseling and tutoring it offers small group seminars on topics such as reading strategies, procrastination, and the minority experience at Harvard, and provides "time out from the challenges and rigors of study," Davis says.

The Bureau counselors also provide guidance to the staffs of other University support centers, such as Room 13 and the Eating Problems Outreach Center.

Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57, who is chairing the search committee, says he hopes to find a new director by "early in the new year."

Several Asian-American students have expressed concern about the search for a new director, however. They say they are troubled by the departure of Jean Wu, who served as associate director of the Bureau under Morimoto and was passed over for the directorship during an earlier round of the replacement search. With Wu' departure, there are no Asian-American administrators in the College, the students say (see accompanying article).

The Bureau was established in 1946 when Walter G. Perry Jr. '35 persuaded the College to merge three separate programs that were then under his management: a tutoring service, a reading strategies course, and a remedial writing program.

The reading strategies course which Perry developed with an associate, Charles Whitlock, is still taught at the Bureau. Films which accompany the course have been used by several other colleges, says Perry, who is now in retirement.

At the Bureau, Perry conducted a 16-year study of college student attitudes toward learning. Interviews with Harvard students each spring showed that there were "identifiable developments in the ways they did their thinking from year to year," said Perry. Each year, the students had a different conception of "what they though knowledge was and how to get it."

The results of the study, which Perry said was among the first of its kind, were published in 1970 in his book, "Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years."

Morimoto succeeded Perry as director of the Bureau in 1979. He instituted workshops to help students with notetaking, time management, and preparation for exams. He also developed workshops for teaching fellows.

Many of the counselors say that Morimoto brought a unique philosophy to counseling. "He has left a legacy with those of us who have learned from him: how to listen to individuals," Davis says. "He offers absolute respect for other human beings, wherever they are in the moment," said Repetto. "He reminded us that as helpers we need a certain amount of humility."

Morimoto, who mantains his post as a lecturer at the School of Education, came to Harvard via a circuitous route that began in his hometown of Pocatello, Idaho. After dropping out of school at age 15, he worked on a farm, fought in World War II, and labored at a railroad yard. He went on to study sociology at Boston University and Harvard.

Morimoto says his "greatest privilege has been talking to students on things that concern them."

Morimoto says that a counselor never knows how greatly he has influenced his students.

The retired director clearly influenced Anne M. Connell '84, now a staff assistant to the borough president of Queens. Connel told Harvard Magazine that she recalls talking to Morimoto when her freshman chemistry course had her "doomed."

"He definitely made me feel that my being upset might make sense," Connell told the alumni bimonthly. "And realizing that it was upsetting, that I could cry, put things in perspective."