The Cum Laude Muddle

The Faculty members who voted this week to extend candidacy for Cum Laude in General Studies to all thesis writing seniors seem to have made a series of bad guesses. In an attempt to throw out any departmental control over the granting or withholding of the degree they touched a raw departmental nerve--the tutorial administrator and thesis advisor's conception of a senior's psychology.

The first vote of the meeting, which aroused little dissent, attacked the notion that departments might recommend or veto students for the C.L.G.S., and seemed reasonable enough: criteria for determining which seniors who abandoned their theses might be eligible would vary greatly from department to department. Essentially, decisions would be arbitrary, hence unfair. It was then that the majority argued: it is much better to unsnarl the whole administrative tangle by legislating automatic eligibility for students with the proper collection of grades. Yet the opposition was quick to point out that to lift the restriction setting the choice for C.L.G.S. or thesis-cum-tutorial an early deadline meant that seniors could drop the thesis at any stage they wished. And, the opposition remarked darkly, many seniors would.

This minority has apparently been joined by at least two major departments. More are likely to follow, and it is hard not to see the good sense in their objections. Any major piece of writing, especially writing based on much research, is bound to impose strains that make the writer want, whimsically or fiercely, to abandon it at some point. Surely the thesis is for an undergraduate an extraordinary strain; thesis advisors and Senior Tutors will acknowledge that in more than occasional cases students not forced to finish it would not do so. (That they can finish it without going mad is clearly shown by the fact that they have done so.) Besides, there is more at stake for the large departments even than a stack of possibly excellent unwritten theses: the administrative problem involved in re-employing deserted tutors looks overwhelmingly more burdensome than the difficulties the Faculty earlier envisioned in dealing with arbitrary departments.

Much of this debate has, of course, been rendered theoretical by the two departments' indication that no matter what the Faculty decided, they themselves would greet anybody renouncing his thesis after committing himself to write it with an E in tutorial. Faculty legislation, which is promoted to ensure approximate uniformity, cannot survive if departments holding sizable numbers of undergraduates flatly threaten to deny their tutees a substantial privilege accorded by others.

Yet there remains a profitable way out of the entire muddle which does not seem so far to have been thoroughly considered. After allowing the decision made last Tuesday to revert to the status quo ante--replacing the October 30 deadline on a student's choice of Honors or C.L.G.S.--the Faculty ought to open up the Honors degree in another fashion. New legislation should grant to the departments the power to recommend for Honors a senior who chose to write a thesis but was unable to complete it for reasons implicit in the thesis material or otherwise outside a momentary disaffection with the tas' These would not be degrees demanding any other grades than the department's usual requirements; they would not be degrees Cum Laude in General Studies at all, but the ordinary Honors of the field.

Such a proposal may not seem too absurd if one recalls the experience of the analogous Gill plan to open tutorial to non-Honors concentrators. If the Faculty had passed a Gill plan that required departments to tutor absolutely all non-Honors students, it would undoubtedly have met the fate the Tuesday legislation is likely to meet. It passed because it allowed department discretition in determining who might be excluded from tutorial through failure to satisfy rock-bottom criteria. The method of liberalizing the cum loud degree suggested here would permit like discretion--although in this case the Faculty should add the explicit enjoinder that the departments be lenient and flexible in judging a student's plea for release from the thesis. Again, practices would doubtless be "arbitrary" and would differ considerably among the departments--just as some fields cheerfully accepted the spirit of the tutorial plan whole, and others barely admitted its existence. But the Gill history has at least shown that delicate and appropriate Faculty legislation can act as a powerful loosening force on some departments' restrictions. And even if other departments do not immediately catch on, the pressures of their colleagues' example and of time may have a marvelous effect on wearing down their resistance.

As for retaining the early deadline, it is only fair. At the beginning of his senior year a student may choose C.L.G.S. (a choice he has good time to consider), or departmental Honors. The latter choice means entering a game whose rules specify writing a thesis, and whose prize is a special sort of degree, with the added incentive that the game itself has sometimes been known to be profitable and even enjoyable. Yet although it would be silly to permit students to reject the thesis at the moments when they are least likely to make the choice reasonably, the harshness of the game should remit when circumstances show that a particular thesis will of necessity be very unprofitable indeed. All that should be asked is that a student present good reasons for his desertion; and his thesis advisor and Head Tutor may then turn him out to another, greener, pasture of inquiry. In any case, Faculty policy should aim at relaxing the bonds of the departments through the departments themselves. Yesterday indicated that fortunately or not, they still hold the real authority over an undergraduate's career.