HALF A LEAGUE ONWARD

The tutorial system at Harvard is very much in the same position as a new baby. It has sufficient ugliness to make honest friends of the parents casual in their praise; it is sufficiently naked to allow real inspection by the skeptic who rather doubts the worth of babies as items in the sum total of pragmatic profit; and it is enough of a power, for all babies are autocrats, to make the older brothers and sisters worry about future fatted calves.

All of these characteristics have their importance, and each of them is worrying in its own way the mind of the University. But the last is by far the most troublesome. For ugliness improves with age--the red sprawl of two weeks is the delightful, gurgling wonder of two months nakedness eventually loses itself in pink ribbons and embroidered flannel--but autocracy grows greater and becomes more formidable with the passing of the months. The tutorial system is doing just that. So the brotherly heart of the lecture system beats the double time of panic. And fear seeps its way into the antiquated manuscripts so long used by many a lecturer as notes for his daily disquisitions.

To be brief the truth is this: seniors, allowed freedom by the tutorial system, are refusing to attend uninteresting lectures or those which do not add to their knowledge of their field or their better appreciation of life and learning in general. So many a gentleman long sure of an audience now remarks empty seats and wonders if this child, the tutorial system, is to fatten upon his heritage.

Nor has this wonder been a without its results. The lecturer still has a certain amount of influence in family circles. He makes his examination cover his lectures instead of the reading and smiles at the worried faces above the blue books. He is still an older son and knows his world.

Yet there are better and fairer ways to enjoy brotherhood with the new infant. One man has discovered an excellent way, for--to continue the metaphor he admits the child's right to dominance and, freed from the responsibility of such prestige, goes his way rejoining. So his lectures are but marginal notes on his text, modern and succinct comments by a scholar and gentleman upon a masterpiece of literatures. And Seniors attend his lectures for the gain to be derived from his personality and his knowledge.

New babies are troublesome creatures. But they are inevitable and their existance cannot be scorned. The tutorial system already has the college at its feet. The faculty also must bow to reality. Lectures must be made to fit the needs of a college under such a system--and they must be vital. For the college mind is a critical mind in a critical age. By giving birth to the tutorial system the University has made one more contribution to the needs of contemporary living the present duty of the University is to make its elder brothers, lecture and class, as useful and interesting as the tutorial system. If this is not done completely, the infant grown may live on alone with his relations under the sod. Half a league onward--the University has gone that far. But to he absolutely successful the whole league must be courageously and adequately covered.