LETTERS

It is recorded in the Harvard apocrypha that a member of admissions committee once said, "Certainly we admit men who to be scientists. They may change their minds."

The story does not amuse Harvard scientists; almost half Freshmen interested in science do indeed switch to other fields. The forced humor masks the tension that the conflict between science and the University has aroused in the Faculty. It is this latent hostility that drove a chemist to violent personal attacks on the admissions office voked a historian to reply that the difference between "two cultures" is that one believes in Harvard College and the other destruction.

The basic conflict, which disturbs both students and Faculty, is that scientists' first loyalty must be to their profession rather than to the university. The scientist-professor's audience is entirely professional. He competes for recognition with full-time government and industry researchers. He can have little more allegiance to Harvard and to teaching than an obstetrician who teaches a few hours a week at a medical school.

The undergraduate scientist faces an equally difficult allegiance. He is preparing for a specialized vocation from moment he starts science at Harvard. The junior in physics is a physicist, cut off from his professionally uncommitted classmates. He's measured by tough professional standards, and his performance is vital to his future. By sophomore year, his choice of career is over, and his career has begun.

The bind is simultaneously emphasized and intensified social disadvantages which scientists suffer. Theories of America make better dinner talk than theories of protein structure. While scientific students are confronted by revealed fact in their courses graduate can often say new and significant things about historical problem.

Science is attractive in school, not only because it is comparative that well taught (and it is comparatively badly taught in College) but also because it offers a career in which students know that their brains will be recognized. When they reach college and discover classmates expect to find recognition in a variety of other fields, their resolution wanes.

Harvard tends to embody an aristocratic outlook which considers college a place to find a career rather than learn one. And it is the preppies, the upper class students, who drop out most from sciences. Middle class graduates of public schools are less college as a four-year moratorium, and tend to treat Harvard as a first step of a career.

Preppies take college more in their stride. They relax and the relative scholastic rank sags (it rises again in Medical and Law School). Their public school contemporaries are under greater pressure and change more than the preppies. The artistocratic ethos is contagious.

McGeorge Bundy once said that an ideal Freshman would be ready to join the Faculty. He did not pose a somewhat more significant quotion: whether a Freshman would want to join the Faculty. Many students are reluctant to commit themselves to science, at least, and Harvard's atmosphere militates against any final commitment.

Perhaps the scientists could attack the problem of dropouts by demanding that the college admit only public school students uncrupted by the aristocratic view of college. Certainly rising aptitude will not solve the difficulty--the sciences will simply see intelligent students switching to other fields unless the trend is reversed.

There has been little research on the problem, but apparently the highly intelligent reach full maturity later, and are not prepared to make final career decisions as soon as others. If any prognostication makes sense, it is that the rising intelligence of the undergraduate and the aristocratic temper of the college will militate against undergraduate science.