A Letter on Tutoring

To the Editor of the Crimson:

I have been following your "anticram school" crusade with some sympathy and interest but feel that you have them far over-emphasized one aspect of the evil while almost wholly neglecting another. I refer to your long editorial on faculty responsibility. How is it so little has been said of the responsibility of the student? If, then, the following remarks seem critical of your work as performed thus far, I hope they will also serve to direct the attack from a broader base than has apparently been visualized to date.

It is rather obvious that you have drawn a false picture in the editorial referred to above since, if it were all as you allege, those "stupid faculty" who are unable to organize their work well must be inferior to the "cram-school" instructional staff which is able to put the organization over. If such superiority were real it would seem incredible that the University Corporation should have ignored such talent sitting, as it were, on their very door step, while hiring the alleged incompetents. The argument, therefore, is ridiculous.

Students Must Do Own Work

Certainly neither you nor I, nor any other self-respecting Harvard student would be happy to see our faculty modeling its lectures after the pattern of the tutoring school's effective evening "cream," yet such would be the result if the remarks in your editorial were to be followed out logically. No, I hardly think that an outstanding faculty like that of our University could be interested in merely training people to answer certain specific questions culled from examinations of the past.

On the contrary, it seems to me, that the obvious job of the students is the assimilation and organization of his own course work. There may be a few cases of excessive course requirement which the faculty might adjust, but the student should hardly complain until he has made very sure that it is impossible to do the work by putting in the minimum of two hours daily per course.

Slackere Ruin Morale

The truth of the matter is that we have among us a group of very clever men possessing the morality of dope-peddlers or munitions manufacturers whose maxim is, "the consumer is responsible for his own folly." These men will continue to prosper, barring violence to their persons, as long as students lack pride in their own work and would just as soon "let George do it" for a few dollars. One slacker in the student body tends to ruin the morale of the whole, since such a one can boast to his working comrades, "I got a B out of old so-and-so without cracking a book."

What is the solution? None! without a radical change in the student attitude. Such a change as I am about to suggest would indeed be miraculous owing to congenital cussedness, original sin, or whatever name you want to give it. When the student ceases to boast of the B or C he got and begins to boast of the new stock of knowledge he has acquired and the new ideas such knowledge has engendered, then and only then will your crusade be won. Short of this there are only palliative. Of course, the Corporation might hire persons to organize a student's work for him free, thus driving the commercial house out of business. But that would simply be a transference and enlargement of the evil. The students might "gang-up" on the cream schools and declare a boycott, but that would only throw the organizing job back upon themselves where it belongs. I for one am firmly convinced that anyone capable of entering Harvard College is capable of carrying the load if he has an interest in doing so.

No! Mr. Editor, before we enter into another's Augean stables let us first clean out our own. Perhaps the example will be infectious. Elmer H. Cutts, 2G.