Everybody's Tutorial

The recent special report on "Advising in Harvard College" attacks with admirable vigor and the roughness the biggest problem of present-day Harvard: depersonalized education.

Two major proposals and several minor ones designed to counteract the trend toward mass education appear in the advising report. The proposal most directly aimed at improving personal faculty student contact is a group tutorial plan under which every student in the five largest academic departments could meet twice monthly for an "undergraduate seminar" with four other students and a faculty member in his field of concentration. This program would give the 75 percent of the students in these departments who are not now on tutorial an organized intellectual relationship with some specific faculty member. Such formal contact should then be expanded informally and Harvard education might become something better for that 45 percent of the undergraduates which never gets beyond desultory attendance at lectures.

Adopting group tutorial would necessitate dropping most individual tutorial now available in the five large departments. Group tutorial, however, would not be quite so valuable as individual tutorial. Individual students would be less free to choose particular items they want to study, and the success of each seminar would depend even more than individual tutorial upon the ability of the tutor conducting it. But then shortcomings of group tutorial do not overcome its advantages. The benefits of group tutorial for the 75 percent in the large departments who now receive no tutorial world more than justify abandoning individual tutorial for the 20 percent in these departments who new receive it.

Other provisions in the advising report are designed to make group tutorial especially effective. The members of each seminar and the tutorial charge would all be associated with the same House. Also, the Faculty would give careful attention to the attraction of good men into tutorial work.

The second major proposal urges that a Dean be assigned to each House. This man--a permanent faculty member who give half his time to administration of his House duties--would carry out the conventional functions of a dean, over the students in his House, and he would coordinate all the group tutorial activity in his House.

The first function would wipe out some of the inadequacy of the present Dean's Office system, which is badly overburdened. As a consequence, students who need Dean's Office attention very often get nothing more personal than a stock 15 minute lecture from an unfamiliar assistant dean. The function of coordinating the House's tutorial activity also looks laudable. It will help to keep the undergraduate seminars active and free from uninterested students and incapable instructors.

The Advising Report proposals can scarcely help but make education in the College more personal. Group tutorial will give every student a chance to know the men who teach him. The House deans recommendation will help in this, and will also make sure each knows the student he is supposed to be in charge of.

If a proper attitude of scientific caution is retained the program recommended by the Advising Report is definitely worth a try.