HISTORY AND LITERATURE

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The tutors and, I am sure, the students in History and Literature must thank you for publicizing in yesterday's editorial some of the problems they every year mutually face. Some misinformation and some distortions nevertheless crept into your estimate of our difficulties this year, and I believe you would wish to have these corrected.

There are several inaccuracies in your discussion of the Junior Qualifying Exam given last spring. To begin with, "the bottom quarter" of the Junior Class did not fail this examination. Sixty-seven took the exam. Of these, fourteen received a grade of "distinction," 26 a grade of "pass," 15 a grade of "marginal pass" and 12 a grade of "fail." The term "fail," of course, means in this context "below B" since the purpose of the examination is to determine a man's qualifications for honors work in the senior year. As one of the four examiners, newly appointed, who wrote and graded the examination I can assure you that setting up what you call a "loaded" examination for thinning out the field never entered our minds. We met through the spring to write what we hoped would be a mature kind of examination, one which eliminated course-type questions and gave more play to a student's intellectual independence and imagination--the qualities, we felt, of good honors candidates. Nothing like a "tutor shortage" existed then or now. The twelve losses of last spring were more than replaced by the eighteen new students taken in last week and tutors in some fields are still somewhat under strength. I believe there is no possibility that the examining system initiated last spring will not be continued, or that the examination will not be graded with equal rigor.

The suggestion that pass candidates apply for a course-reduction was made because several students came to us and asked if there was any way to do a major piece of research and writing in their senior year. Our tutorial staff is sufficiently large to accommodate all of our concentrators with tutors, even those seniors who are not permitted to submit a thesis. Each spring, of course, we do as you recommend we do: we take a count before admitting new students to the field. Let that student who has no tutor throw the first stone!

Anyone (including the senior tutor) who generalizes about the quality of tutorial in all of any field is probably on shaky ground, but the CRIMSON's remarks about ours seem particularly hasty. You make two points. First, that honors seniors cannot have tutorial with senior members of the faculty, as presumably they may in other fields; and second, that "most of the tutors are young instructors or graduate students and ... students are often assigned to a tutor with a different field of interest than their own." About the first point, members of the Committee have long ago expressed themselves as willing to tutor highly qualified seniors and every year several students avail themselves of this privilege. A check with other large departments suggests that the number of students working with permanent members of the faculty is about the same--and equally low--everywhere. Of our 196 concentrators last year, eight had tutorial with senior professors or members of the Committee. In History the count, I believe, is 19 or 20 out of 551; in Government, 37 out of 455; in English, 31 out of five or six hundred. Thus, the CRIMSON's second point, that most of our tutors are young, etc. would apply, of course, equally to all these fields--and perhaps properly so. I think it could be argued that younger teachers are often less pressured and hence able to be more generous with their time. They are also very often less specialized and more willing to explore areas of the field outside their own special fields--and there are more of them. There are and always will be loopholes and overcrowding here and there in a tutorial program where twenty-eight tutors offer eighteen different fields of study. Nonetheless, anyone who took the trouble to examine the qualifications of our tutors would be impressed with preparation and versatility comparable, I believe, to appointees in other fields. The Committee, I am sure, would say about this as President Eliot once said to Henry Adams: "Show us better men and we will hire them." William R. Taylor,   Chairman of the Board of Tutors.