Advising Should Be Preventative

I was happy to read your in-depth report of May 24 on the administration's review of the student advising system. Change at Harvard, being rare, is almost always welcome, and the modifications implemented in this case merit particular hospitality, signifying as they do a tardy recognition of what most students have long perceived: Harvard's psychic corrosiveness.

But the reforms the administration proposes are woefully insufficient. Better training for proctors and counselors, increased publicizing of the Bureau of Study Counsel and encouragement of tutor-student contact all seem directed at weaving a finer net below students so that none fall through. What would be more useful would be to reach students not when they're already well on the way down, but when they're still in the air. It seems silly to intervene only at the latest possible stage; sure, it may prevent actual suicides, absolving Harvard of guilt, but it will not spare students the terror of the plummet.

Harvard--not just the administration but the entire community--needs to take preventive action. Circuses, with which this university shares much, spend more time training their acrobats than recruiting net seamstresses, and Harvard should follow their example. Changing the ethos of this place--changing the climate that leads to psychic instability--would not be easy, as it can't be a matter of committees and afternoon talk sessions. It would rather be an extended exploration of ideas considered too trite or irrelevant for our learned discourse: that the honors for which we sell our souls are Faustian purchases, that the study carrels in which we spend January and May are lonelier than coffins, that the competitiveness here is a posture whose graceless stiffness no conversation with a tutor could soften. We have all become hunchbacks before our time and we have only ourselves and each other to blame for the burden, but that does not make it any less real. We know these things, we know that Harvard is sick and, not for the first time, turning to UHS and Harvard's other vaunted, empty "resources" isn't going to do much good. --Jennifer L. Hanson '97