Staff Mischaracterizes Leverett Master’s Stance

To the editors:

I believe that your Jan. 6 editorial on house tutor evaluations misrepresented my position (Staff editorial, "All Tutors Need Feedback," Jan. 6).

There are some obvious advantages to having a very formal tutor evaluation procedure, perhaps even (though this is much less obvious) one based on numerical rankings. But there are also some clear negatives. I believe that for Leverett House, the negatives outweigh the positives, which is why we have not participated.

I am very grateful to the other Masters for allowing Leverett to go our own way on this. In spite of randomization, the Houses retain distinct personalities determined by their architecture and geography. Leverett is unusual in having a large number of married tutor suites. In part because of this, our tutors tend to be older and more mature than resident tutors at other Houses. Some raise kids in the House. This contributes to a homey, family atmosphere at Leverett that I love and have tried to nurture.

Each tutor contributes to House life in several different ways. Very few of the students see all the different things tutors are doing for the House. The tutors themselves form a community within the larger community of the House. The fact that they respect and trust and even like one another makes it easier for them to support one another in their efforts to support the students. One of the things that I worry about in a formal tutor evaluation system is that it might undermine this delicate feeling of tutor community.

Our present system of tutor evaluation is very much informal, and certainly not something that can be captured in a sequence of integers from 1 to 5. Our Allston Burr Senior Tutor Catherine R. Shapiro and my wife Ann and I are always eager to hear about how our tutors are doing. We get a lot of comments from students on the subject and we would welcome even more. In January, we meet with each tutor or tutor couple separately, and discuss how the students in their entry and their sophomore advisees are doing. We also ask about their own progress, academic and otherwise, and determine whether they wish to stay for another year. We then make final decisions about who will be reappointed before a tutor selection committee including students and current tutors convenes in February to find new resident tutors to replace those who are leaving.

I have discussed the issue of tutor evaluation with the tutors at some length over the last year. They would welcome more feedback. They try to do their best for the students and would like to know how to do better. But almost all feel that feedback should be personal, not anonymous and numerical, because their relationship with the students is personal—not like the relationship between student and teaching fellow. And they agree with me that learning to give such feedback to people who care about you is an important part of growing up.

Ann and I really do think of Leverett House—students, tutors and staff—as a kind of extended family. It is because I want Leverett House to be a family that I am very reluctant to go along with any sort of numerical tutor evaluation scheme. We always want student input. But if there is a problem in a family, the solution is to have open, honest communication, not to have everyone fill out forms about everyone else.

Howard Georgi
Jan. 8, 2003

The writer is Master of Leverett House.