Pro Tutor 'Good Deal' for Student Willing to Spend Money, Not Time

A short, heavy-set Harvard alumnus with gray hair and a Phi Beta Kappa key has been spoon-feeding me History 32a for a little over a month new. He is a professional tutor.

For any undergraduate who would rather spend money than time on his course work, and who has more social engagements than scruples, professional tutoring is a Good Deal. I say this with a certain degree of authority, because for twenty dollars and six hours work I got a B plus in an hour exam covering one third of a term's material.

News Leaks Out

When the CRIMSON learned on December 2 that Lester Cramer was trying to revive the lucrative trade he enjoyed before the war, the editors decided to send a man around to investigate.

The idea was for a CRIMSON representative, in the guise of a harried undergraduate, to find out from actual experience the workings of the postwar tutoring school, and to evaluate, also from experience, its services.

Such a guinea pig, of course, would have to have an air of freshman-like innocence and a convincingly slight knowledge of nineteenth-century European history, so I set to work at once. The letter which Cramer had sent to a College club was necessarily vague, so the first stop was to phone the number on the letterhead for further information.

I dialed C-A-7-1-0-4-7.

"Cramer, speaking." The voice was smooth, low-pitched and non-committal.

"I'd like to find out about, UN, getting some tutoring in a European history course I'm taking," I said.

On the Hend

"You mean History 32?" the voice asked.

Since there are about half a dogen European history courses being given here this term, this seemed little less than paychie.

I continued. "Well then, I guess you know they're having an hour exam next Tuesday. Anyhow, I haven't done any of the reading for it in fact, I haven't been to the lectures for about six weeks. Can you help me out."

He assured me he could, in five or six hours of tutoring, but I would have to see him some morning, since he was "all filled up" for the next few afternoons. I agreed to this, as well as to his fee of five dollars an hour, and he gave me an appointment for the next morning at ten, in the name of "David Murray."

Since my real name appears two or three times a week in the CRIMSON masthead, and might be expected to draw something less than an open-argued welcome from such an old enemy of the papers a "nom deserve" was necessary.

The next morning I opened a checking account under my new name at the Cambridge Trust Company and went in to Cramer's office an Devonshire Street, deep in Boston's financial district.

Impressive Surroundings

I found Cramer ensconced in a small third-floor office its walls lined with colored graphs on unemployment figures and economic trends, and book cases full of large volumes, mostly on labor relations. Cramer himself added to the general air of efficiency. He is about five feet seven, has a build like Sidney Green street and a personality which fairly exudes confidence from the first.

Asserting that "We're business-like but informal," he wasted no time getting down to work. The system was simple; he would scan the textbook (Binkley's "Realism and Nationalism") page by page and dictate a condensation of the material, slowly enough for me to copy into my notebook.

Great Background

Cramer knows his stuff, there is no doubt about that. He was able to supplement the text when I evidenced ignorance of some particular reference, and he showed a glib familiarity with treaty dates, foreign phrases, and the like.

"It impresses some people," he said deprecatingly, when I pointed to the Phi Beta Kappa key attached to the chain of a fancy Swiss pocket watch he kept lying on the desk to time our progress through History 32. "It's what a man knows that counts, not just the marks he can get"--a rather starting bit of philosophy to hear from a professional tutor. When I read him a list of six topics which Professor Ropp had given out as probable exam questions, Cramer said, "We don't want to aim for any particular topics. This man Ropp fooled some of the boys on the last exam, so we don't want to take any chances this time."

So we confined our "study" to the textbook, and at the end of two hours had covered approximately half of it. A session of equal length the next morning finished off Binkley, leaving only a few chapters in Schaprio's History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century" to be done.

Ah, for the Good Old Days

Cramer is a talkative man. He told me about the "good old days" when be was established in a whole floor of offices over Hayes-Bickford, as the Parker-Cramer Tutoring School. "We used to have three or four hundred students," he said wistfully. "Sometimes as many as fifty percent of the men in a course were coming to us."

Things are different now, though There is a limit to the amount of work one man can do, even if, as Cramer says. "I often work fourteen, fifteen hours a day during reading period."

Soothes Fears

When I asked him if this wasn't all slightly illegal on my part according to University regulations, he reassured me. "The only thing they don't like is groups of five or more." But what was the difference between this and the University's official tutoring bureau? "They don't guarantee you a decent grade. I can get you a B." And as for the official crackdown on tutee schools in 1940. "There was a lot of hypocrisy over at Harvard. If you're interested in journalism," he added, "it's a fascinating story."

During the second session. Inquired about having a term paper written for me. "I don't suppose you could save me the trouble of sitting here copying it down by writing it at your leisure and giving it to me could you.?" I asked. He didn't suppose so. "That would be too much like just buying a ready-made theme. It's good for your soul to copy it down."

Little more was to be gained by fur ther tutoring at this point, at least as far as the CRIMSON was concerned, so in the interests of economy I did the rest of the work for the hour exam myself. The grade tells the story; on the essay question, answered largely with the material covered in my tutoring sessions, I got an A minus; on the short-answer questions, my own contribution, a C plus.

Cramer had advised me to call him around the middle of December if I wanted help with the final exam, since he would be "pretty busy in January." To find out just how busy he was during reading period, and thus get some idea how many undergraduates were taking the primrose path to a Harvard degree, I waited till last week to call him.

Doubling-Up

It was late, but he squeezed me in on a joint appointment with another history scholar for Friday afternoon. When I asked him point-blank, "out of curiosity," just how many boys he is now helping through Harvard, Cramer replied that he "would rather not say." But he admitted that he was a hard taskmaster: "If I were working for someone, I'd insist on a full hour for lunch. But I exploit myself."

Another session last Tuesday finished the main reading period text, and my mentor pronounced me "ready for the final."

Cramer's parting words, as I pressed the last of $34 of CRIMSON money into his hand, were, "I just hope the word doesn't spread around too much about this. All I'd need would be an article about it in the school paper. . . .