Orchids to Dean Hanford

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld).

Dean Hanford's Annual Report shows signs of an intelligent comprehension of some of the major problems of Harvard College. The red tape which has heretofore been the accompaniment of a Harvard Education: to wit 17, 16, or 15 courses, daily attendance at classes, and the inevitable hour exams are recognized as undesirable and unnecessary. Now if the Dean and the President can only get together, and do something about it, Harvard may blossom forth and regain its place as a center of culture and learning instead of its present unenviable degree-factory characteristics.

But if these changes are contemplated, several others must inevitably accompany them:

1. We must modify our concentration--distribution--language requirement plan. If a man is to take 13 or 14 courses, he cannot take four or six of them in one field, two in an allied field, four in distribution, one or two in languages, and still get a good general education. The writer earnestly recommends to the attention of the university that superficial and survey material is best covered by lectures, whereas intensive concentration in a subject, by its very nature, lends itself to supervised reading and tutorial conferences.

If the number of courses for concentration were cut down or eliminated, a man might spend part of his college career taking courses of broadening nature, while at the same time, he could work under a tutor in his special field of concentration, progressively devoting more time to this in the course of his four years.

2. Competent tutors must be provided. The academic system at Harvard as it is today is paradoxical, the focal point of everything being the tutor, who is more often than not unsuited to the task. Tutors should be brilliant men with above average minds, who have mastered their subject in its breadth, and are specialists in some phase of it, men who are interested in teaching, and who like to work with young men. They must have attractive and interesting personalities, and should be neither young nor old. And, furthermore, they must be well paid. No man of this calibre can be expected to work for the paltry stipend a tutor now receives. More tomorrow, Veritas.