Infirm Footing

One year after the University announced its policy of cutbacks in tutorial personnel and administration, the undergraduate is still bewildered by what has happened to this distinctive feature of Harvard education and disheartened by the prospects for its revival. Tutorial has become an almost forgotten cause, with the administration, faculty, and Student Council tacitly permitting the entire situation to gather dust. As it exists today, tutorial bears little resemblance to the overall effort that marked prewar guidance. The only hope for it lies in active blueprinting by the faculty, careful planning for the days when tutors will again be on the academic market and when the only excuse for the death of tutorial will be financial strangulation or neglect on the part of the administration.

It has been estimated that in two years the delicate mechanism of training will have ground out sufficient numbers of instructors to give department heads quality as well as quantity to choose from. With this prospect within view, relatively few of the departments have made any attempt to alter their budgets to absorb this new strength. In the Social Sciences, Government still offers tutorial to that 25 percent who are candidates for honors; History has not budged from its original stand, and Economics offers no tutorial but merely a makeshift arrangement for thesis consultation. More disconcerting than this present indifference is the lack of interest exhibited by the Social Sciences, as well as such fields as English and History and Literature, in all plans which would turn this buyers' market of academic talent into a renaissance of tutorial.

Where the hand of influence may be discovered is something that only an intimate knowledge of the checks and balances within the Administration could explain. If the cases against tutorial can be expounded less and less in terms of manpower, it must be explained in terms of someone's unwillingness to spend the money somewhere. The departments, almost to the last, will disclaim any direct responsibility for the cutbacks and will point to budgets that will not allow for expansion in this line. The Administration, from whom all budgets flow--albeit with departmental advice--will counter with claims that once the budget is granted, each department has a free hand to go on ahead autonomously with plans for tutorial. The departments may have a free hand, but have they the money?

In the midst of this ponderous Army game, a few conclusions stand clear. The first is that there is a strong impetus stemming from high places for permanent cutbacks in tutorial. Whether this squares with the Administration's claim that tutorial is now on a "firmer footing" is left for future tutor-less undergraduates to evaluate. The second is that the individual departments have been more willing to accept this pressure than they have been to stand firm now for some concrete planning that would actually put strength into the tutorial system. And lastly, the issue of tutorial has been allowed to slip from view: a highly dangerous development if students are to grow aware of what they are losing.