Faculty Delays Action on Tutorial

The Faculty yesterday postponed action on changes in tutorial until next month.

Dean Bundy paid farewell to the Faculty at the heavily-attended meeting, whose members gave him two standing ovations.

Discussion on the proposed tutorial and Honors changes was primarily exploratory, according to Richard T. Gill '48, Allston Burr Senior Tutor of Leverett House and principal author of the plan.

The postponement, he explained, was in order to permit more discussion by the departments--particularly the larger ones--of the implications of the changes.

Outside the working details of the plan, chief attention was directed by the Faculty to the question of whether the proposal to offer tutorial instruction to all students would result in an increase in students taking the program beyond the department's ability to staff them.

Gill noted last night that the net number of people shifting into tutorial is difficult to estimate but he doubted the number would flood the program. Although students taking tutorial will not have to have Honor grades, they will have to do the extra work of the present Honors program without the guarantee of receiving an Honors degree.

One amendment to the motion was offered by the English Department. It would have the effect of allowing departments to restrain poor students in tutorial programs from writing theses.

Besides allowing for consideration by the departments, the postponement will allow the CEP, which has approved the proposal unanimously, to clear up some technical points in the program.

As it was presented, the program will abolish the distinction between Honors and non-Honors concentrators, allowing all students to enter junior and senior tutorial and to write a thesis. These students would do the equivalent of Honors work but could be students whose grades were below Honors level and who would receive a degree without distinction.

Coupled with the tutorial change will be a revision in the requirement for obtaining a degree of cum laude in General Studies whereby all students not taking senior tutorial will be automatically considered for the General Studies degree.

In his farewell speech, Dean Bundy prased the freedom and independence of the University which had brought it through the McCarthy era and which now saw it so high in the public esteem.

He declined, however, to offer any "instruction" to his successors or to review the events of his seven year term, but instead made several general remarks and thanked the members of the Faculty for the good wishes they had extended him.