State of the College

For an undergraduate who before the war was a concentrator in either English or History and Literature, the situation in the English Department confronting him upon his return has been largely one of confusion and disappointment. For despite the relative shortness of his wartime sabbatical, the English concentrator has returned to find almost all of the promising young instructors who had been here previously gone off to teaching jobs elsewhere, as well as serious gaps in the Department's course offerings.

Prominent in the memories of English and History and Lit concentrators before the war were three men: C.L. Barber, Mark Schorer, and Wallace Stegner. None of them remain. To raise the issue of the why's and wherefore's of Wallace Stegner's disappearance is to raise the shade of one of the oldest and heariest problems in the Department's history, the issue of whether or not creative artists have a rightful place on the Faculty. Stegner occupied, while he was here, one of the Briggs-Copeland instructor must go elsewhere after his appointment is completed. As a result, other colleges have represented on their faculties such outstanding men of letters as Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and W. H. Auden, while Harvard undergraduates must get along on a starvation diet of composition courses and depend for the inspiration and advice such men could offer on the Morris Gray Fund guest lectures. Although it would be possible for Harvard to obtain one or more men of the calibre of Auden or Tate, the University's blindness to the invaluable services which such men could render has made Harvard not a center of creative effort in America, but a whistle stop on the guest lecture circuit.

Both as teachers and scholars, Barber and Schorer stood in the best tradition of the English Department. But because, for one reason and another, both of them refused to disgorge the prescribed number of published pages by the prescribed date, they have gone elsewhere, leaving an unfilled gap in the Department behind them. The enthusiastic reception of Schorer's book on William Blake, published subsequent to his departure from Harvard, is evidence of the fallaciousness of the University's insistence on published research as the dominant criterion of its Faculty appointments.

Typical of the serious lacks which exist in the Department partly as a result of the absence of young men of the calibre of Schorer and Barber is the situation in the field of American literature. Above the basic introductory course, English 7, exactly two undergraduate courses in the field have been offered this fall: one on the local color movement and the other on American fiction since 1890. Both are specialized in the extreme and neither is concerned with the central focus of American literature, the middle span of the nineteenth century. And to pile Ossa on Pelion, the course on American fiction since 1890 conflicts in examination group with professor Merk's History of the Westward Movement--by all odds the outstanding American history course offered in the College.

If young teachers like Barber and Schorer had been replaced by men of equal talent the returning concentrator's disappointment would have been only temporary, but the hard, cold fact is that not only are such men in a sense irreplaceable, but the current "teachers' market" has sharply increased the competition for competent young instructors. Thus it is that the University's prodigal policy as regards its instructors--requiring them to meet a "produce or-else" deadline, undervaluing their qualifications as teachers--has come home to roost, plaguing the English Department with a shortage of good teachers at the very time-when their presence is most vital.