Open House

Radcliffe has always been a source of chagrin to the Harvard faculty, and the recent tussle over tutors has brought "those things which divide us" into the open once again. There have been grumblings about Radcliffe's lack of initiative in seeking its own tutors, about its parasitism on the House system, and about the load of non-resident tutors forced onto the Houses.

But the fact remains that Harvard faculty are Radcliffe faculty and Radcliffe students pay the same tution as their brethren on the perhaps unrealistic assumption that they are getting the same education. And tutors are an important part of a Harvard-Radcliffe education. To be fair, it would appear that departments must seek some means by which Radcliffe will have an equal chance with Harvard at getting the best tutors, who are likely to be in the Houses.

Sophomore year is the rallying point of most of the protests and solutions, but since many students continue working with the same tutor on into the junior and senior years, the issue extends even further. A good group tutorial usually leads to good individual tutorials and to important contacts within the department for the student who has done well with an outstanding tutor.

Many of the not-so-good tutorials in the sophomore year seem to occur at the outposts of the Harvard-Radcliffe camps. All-girl tutorials with a woman tutor, especially in a "masculine" field such as Government, often lack the gusto necessary to valuable discussion. On the other hand, many all-male group tutorials degenerate into beer and cheer sessions, where the tutors is "one of the boys" and becomes less responsible. There are some defenders of House privacy who argue that a breezy informality is a necessary prerequisite of learning, but the weight of evidence would indicate that the tutorial meeting, like the classroom, does not suffer when girls are admitted.

But the fact that mixed tutorials work out well does not mean that each department can begin shuffling students around at random. In the first place, once girls begin to migrate to the Houses, tutors have to go there too. Most of the Houses have as many tutors as they can stand now, and several Masters have indicated they will not take any more. In the smaller fields, there is no reason why tutors affiliated with a House should have to tramp back and forth between the Houses and the Quad when they could handle mixed groups in the Houses, but in the popular Radcliffe fields, such as English, History and Lit, and Social Relations, there would be girls left over after the Houses had taken all they could.

To argue that this body of left-over girls is sufficient reason for Radcliffe resident tutors is to ignore the fact that Radcliffe, since it is a woman's institution, will not attract many of the best Harvard tutors. Radcliffe is no Wellesley, and until Harvard moves to Peterborough, New Hampshire, the Annex will not have an intellectual life of its own. To increase all-girl tutorials is to make Radcliffe girls feel like "second-class citizens" and to increase a problem, not to solve it.

Many departments now try to fit people with the same interests and abilities into tutorial groups. Each House is trying to get its concentrators into tutorials with a House-affiliated tutor. Neither of these goals should be sacrificed to "mixed tutorial." But "mixed tutorial" should be added as a third important objective by both large and small departments and by the Houses. With these objectives in mind, the problem of non-resident tutor offices becomes clearer. Perhaps these tutors will be given space at Radcliffe, perhaps in a vacant room left in a House after deconversion. It doesn't really matter. Radcliffe has had to walk to the Houses for tutorial in the past and won't mind continuing to do so, and Harvard students have gone to Radcliffe for tutorial as well. Harvard and Radcliffe may never be "integrated" in the same manner as a Big Ten College, but they can never be "separate, but equal" again.