Survey Stresses Student-Faculty Contact

Last Monday the University officially released an impressive 133-page self-criticism called the "Report on Advising in Harvard College." Mixed-up world conditions may prevent the University from enacting any of the recommendations made in the study but if conditions don't do this, the report will very likely have the most significant effect on Harvard education of any analysis since that of the Committee on General Education in 1941.

Exactly what the concrete results of the two year study will be, it is impossible to tell now. Nearly every proposal made in the report will be objectionable to some University policy maker or another. But the value and importance of the Advising Report, lies not in the specific proposals it makes, but in the issues it deals with, the problems it is trying to solve. Nearly everyone at Harvard likes the goals of the report, though some may disagree with the means proposed in it.

The "Advising" report is really concerned with much more than its name implies. "Advising" is defined so broadly that it comes to mean virtually all faculty student contacts, not merely those in which students are specifically helped in the solving of their problems. The report actually deals with the relations of the students in Harvard College to their teachers.

This relationship is what the administration was worried about when it called for the report. The post war College was providing a different education than it did in the 1930's, and there were many observers who thought that the modern brand of education wasn't any better than the traditions which it supplanted.

Increase in the number of students without corresponding increases in the size of the faculty, the curtailment of tutorial instruction, and the scowling of the Houses all helped cause a broad, new tendency towards mass education. Nor was this helped by the increased use of young, inexperienced Teaching Fellows rather than permanent faculty men as undergraduate advisors.

Also, taking a long-range view, the student body at the College now has become more heterogeneous in nature and origin than it was 50 years ago. The 1100 students in each incoming class now come from diverse educational, geographic, social, economic, religious, and racial backgrounds. Their varied standards of value are more likely to clash, and their college-time troubles are more numerous than in the days of President Eliot. Clearly an advising problem is created here, as well as by the factors mentioned above.

What Should Advising Do?

Before launching into an investigation of the present-day advising system with the purpose of bettering it, the faculty committee that made the report set down a number of basic principles to guide its discussion.

The most notable of these general propositions are that advising is an essential part of a good College education, and that this advising should not be concerned merely with academic problems, but with all sides of the student's personality. However, "advising, in a college which emphasizes independence, maturity, and self-education, will not be paternalistic." Students will be made to make their own decisions. Advisers will only listen and provide information.

Another basic decision is that guidance experts, or professional counselors, will not be used. Ordinary advising must be based on "an organized intellectual relationship between teacher and student," for in that relationship most of the value of advising appears. But specialists will be used for certain important aspects of advising, such as reading and psychiatric problems.

Once the principles are laid down, the investigation and evaluation begin.

The main cause of the trouble in the College's entire advising system is that it has grown in spurts through the years, in a totally unplanned fashion, the report says. Not until now has there been any attempt to plan the system as a whole--in relation to the educational purposes of the College. When the College reached the size where Freshmen were not well watched by their instructors, the Board of Freshman Advisers was set up. When the commercial tutoring schools threatened the basis of fair grade competition in the College, they were drive out and the Bureau of Study Counsel was inaugurated. Later the psychiatry portion of the Hygiene department was established.

The New Advising Plan

The educational program followed a similar evolutionary procedure. Concentration and distribution requirements arrived, General Education, Tutorial, and the whole lot. Each new development had its effect on the formal and informal relations of students and teachers, or advisers. The result was a large, active advising system, but one that was not so efficient as it might have been and the exact purpose of which remained ill defined.

To consider each section of the advising program in turn:

Neglected Upperclassmen

The advising committee deplores the lack of personal contact between upperclass students and faculty members in all departments of the College. But it is mainly concerned with the five largest fields, in which the depersonalized system of education has come into fairly general practice. That the fields of Economics, English, Government, History, and Social Relations should house 60 percent of the upperclassmen and yet have only 32.7 percent of the total faculty manpower is cited as the cause for concentrators in these fields receiving "an education which is markedly different from that received by concentrators of other departments."

There is little that can be done toward equalizing the student faculty ratio in the different from that received by concentrators of other departments."

There is little that can be done toward equalizing the student faculty ratio in the different departments, however. Endowments to special departments and permanent faculty assignments are made with regard to many factors other than the short-range popularity of the fields. Thus when a field like Social Relations zooms to a top position in a very few years, the students in the field are exposed to fewer faculty contacts than the concentrators in the well-named Classics department, for instance.

Since the worst advising situation exists in these five fields, and the greatest number of concentrators are also in these fields, the committee has some justification in saying that "the most serious deficiency in the present advising program would be eliminated if means could be found for putting this 44 percent of the upperclassmen (those in the five fields who do not receive tutorial) in regular, significant, direct contact with instructors."

Undergraduate Seminars

Group tutorial is the device introduced for remedying this "most serious deficiency." Everyone in the five departments who is now on individual tutorial would be taken off this arrangement, except for perhaps the top five percent of the juniors and seniors. Then all sophomores, and the juniors and seniors not on individual tutorial, would be tutored in regular five-man seminars.

These tutorial groups would meet every two weeks, and the procedure would be much the same as that in conventional single tutorial: Reading would be done in material outside of the course requirements, and emphasis would be on writing and discussion.

The tutors to handle these seminars will be drawn from faculty members from the rank of full professor down the line. Presumably a new hiring-and-incentives system would be inaugurated along with the group tutorial plan in order to entice high quality Ph.D.'s into the field of tutorial instruction.

IN the 23 remaining departments--the smaller ones--tutorial remains under the control of the particular departments. They are free to continue as they have--offering either partial tutorial or no tutorial--or to adopt the group system.

To remedy in another way the mass-education tendencies of the Harvard system, the committee makes a second large-scale proposal--that the Houses should be more fully developed as units in themselves, decentralized "colleges."

Says the report: "At Harvard, which has all the advantages of a great university, the Houses can provide also all the important advantages of a small institution if they are properly developed. But. . . the individual Houses (must be) small enough to be manageable units for social, athletic, and activities purposes. . . (they must) have a genuine function in the educational program of the College beyond that of dormitory and dining hall,"

The emphasis on the Houses is to be attained by establishing House Deans. Those Deans would replace the present Senior Tutors, and would have considerably more prestige, as well as more powerful functions.

House Deans

The House Dean would have powers in his House corresponding to the powers that the College deans in charge of discipline now have. In addition he would be in charge of coordinating the advising program in his House. He would see that all the students in his House who took group tutorial under the five large departments had tutors who also were associated with that House. (This again helps lay emphasis on the Houses as educational centers. the House Dean would keep a record of the tutorial (and academic) activities of all his students, as reported to him by the tutors in all departments at the end of each term.

System Solves Advising Problem

The House Dean system would help solve another of the problems of existing advising system. At present the central Dean's office is the catch all of students' troubles. Since the advising system as a whole is comparatively now and has little central organization, the final weight in all problems falls upon the head of undergraduate students. This great responsibility, the report argues, keeps the Dean of the College from functions which are more important in the

Need for Coordinationlong run. The House Dean system would relieve him of the myriad personal problems that fill his days.

As a final recommendation, the study asks that a committee on advising be act up, with the Dean of the College as chairman. This committee would coordinate the Houses, the departments, and the special services, thus providing team work, efficiency, and unity of purpose, the lack of which is so lamented in this survey of the existing advising system