The Mislaid Cause

Somewhere between June and September, struggle for tutorial faded silently from the public eye. There were hopes that the battle would be joined once again with the start of the fall term, but the contestants--faculty, administration, and student council alike--have turned to fresher fields of endeavor, and what was once a robust educational fight seems to have become merely a pallid and unimportant disagreement.

Just why the issue has been allowed to die is a a matter for the historians--perhaps the intervention of other, more immediate problems forced out the tutorial question, perhaps faculty or student indolence is the answer. Whatever the causes, one of the most important educational considerations in the recent history of Harvard College has been allowed to slip out of sight during a period which may wield a significant influence on the College's academic future.

Within the various departments of the faculty, confusion reigns supreme on the tutorial issue. Faculty members admit that current practices are no better than stop-gaps, but there is little discussion of better programs and little planning for what must be a brighter future.

Typical manifestations of the faculty's confusion can be found in the English Department, where expediency stands supreme and no moves towards improving the situation are apparent. Faced last year with a serious lack of good tutors and the general budgetary limitations being felt by all the Faculty, the department limited its tutorial instruction to honors candidates in Group III or better. Within six months of this step serious academic shocks began to occur.

Realizing that it could not test non-honors concentrators on the same basis as those with the advantage of tutoring, the department voted to eliminate the divisional examinations for non-honors candidates and to lighten the course requirement structure. With such a move, as Professor Sherburn, the division's chairman, has admitted, the English Department virtually announced that its graduates could no longer attain the level of academic achievement reached by past holders of the degree.

Members of the department are now searching for some way to retract this admission, to raise the academic standard to its former level. And invariably the search must lead to a cry for more tutorial or a workable substitute for it, like group departmental instruction.

Chairman Sherburn has stated that the manpower problem is on the way towards solution, with many new young instructors becoming available, thus leaving only the budgetary pressures as hindrances. President Conant opened the way to elimination of this limiting factor with his announcement of last April 9 that such budgetary pressures would not be applied.

Where, then, is that cry, the cry for tutorial that is apparently there for the asking? The culprit is apathy--faculty apathy that blocks any planning for tutorial or any real effort to expand it, student apathy that keeps the pressure of opinion dormant. Until indifference is met and routed, the future of the tutorial system and the education that goes with it will remain discouragingly black.