The Tutoring School Racket

Lined up on Massachusetts Avenue, grinning obscenely down over Harvard Yard, there is a row of intellectual brothels. Every year they are patronized by two-thirds of the student body; every year they flout with greater insolence the decency and respectability of this College. Their grip has tightened until they threaten to constrict all the life and all the vitality from the Harvard system, and the moral degeneration for which they are responsible is cumulative. They are making a mockery of a Harvard education; a lie of a Harvard diploma.

"Tutoring schools have grown out of their proper place and are a corrosive influence on Harvard's educational standards." The Student Council was pulling its punches when it made this statement two years ago. The same thing should have been shouted in four-letter monosyllables. Once upon a time, tutoring was understood to be a type of legitimate aid, granted to help a slow but honest student. Now, at Harvard, it is defined as a method of passing courses without working, without thinking, without learning.

Every college has its isolated instances of cheating and illegitimate tutoring. But only at Harvard has this been elevated to the status of large-scale commercial enterprise. Harvard's position is unique in the collegiate scene when it comes to the high-pressure tactics, the money-magnetic propensities, the universally rotten influence of her tutors. Nowhere else do they openly exhibit their wares in the authorized student publications. Nowhere else do they presume to stuff their literature into student mail boxes for months without end, throughout the entire academic session. And nowhere else have they established themselves so securely that they dare embark on campaigns of respectability, making bold appeals directly to parents, whispering twisted words about their services to "maladjusted Freshmen" and kindred confused spirits.

No one will deny them the success of their tactics. For Harvard has accepted this cancer as a part of itself, and the tutoring schools have become integrated with the system which exists here. The moral attitude toward them has so hardened that a majority of students fell ethically justified in using them. Harvard's collective conscience has almost completely disappeared in this respect; students regularly cheat and feel no qualms about so doing. Parents condone: one tutor recently boasted that his position was impregnable since he tutored the sons of the Corporation. And, more than this, the University administration and Faculty have slid into a neat little niche of grudging tolerance. They recognize that an evil exists, but their inaction bespeaks a dangerous fatalism, a conviction that the evil is inevitable.

This slothfulness can arise only from ignorance of the size of the evil. The tutoring poison has permeated the whole organism; it leaves little untouched. Examinations are no test of knowledge when the examined have had the questions spotted or stolen for them in advance by academic hijackers and have been crammed with the answers. An acceptable thesis means nothing when the material has been organized or the whole paper has been written by a tutoring school. A course credit is no fitting reward when the recipient has not turned a hand to secure it. A diploma is a valueless trinket when the graduate has gone through college without once exercising his brain, without once garnering an honest grade.

The situation amounts to his: Harvard, proudest school in the land, pretending to preeminence in American education, is fast turning rotten inside. Her academic standards, supposedly peers of any to be found, are becoming empty and sham. The attendance of her students at Square tutoring schools is not only intellectual self-defilement; if this were true the whole business could be easily dismissed with some smug generalization about students hurting only themselves. It is not only a force which cramps the exercise of her liberal educational doctrine, freedom of the student, unlimited cuts, non-recording of attendance, and which will force her to retreat. It is also a frontal attack on her worth as an educational institution, an annihilation of her standards until they are shadowy and farcical.

At the risk of compromising its financial position, the Crimson has decided to have nothing more to do with this organized vice racket. It is necessary somehow to force the lids off the sewer holes, to shine the light of day on the putrefaction within. The University must be made to examine itself. For recognition of the amazing whole and its details can surely have only one result: steps toward extermination.