Richard T. Gill

Of several short stories that the next Master of Leverett House wrote in the mid 1950's, the one that was most popular related a schoolboy's experiences during the Depression. Like nearly all of Mr. Gill's writing, the story concerned psychological development; a few years after it first appeared, an anthology editor republished it, together with half a dozen pieces by other authors, under a quite appropriate collective heading--"Understanding One's Self."

The study of Depression life was a characteristic Gill short story not only in that it dealt with the introspections of an imaginative and sensitive mind, but also in another, more important respect: it described children. And it concentrated on the tangled process of their growing up.

It seems entirely natural that at the time he was writing about this sort of subject, Mr. Gill should have already have decided to make his career in the field of education. His special bent has proved to be the administration of college affairs, a field to which he brought a pronounced feeling for the individual student. In the words of one tutor who has worked with him in Leverett House for the past several years, "Gill has always been unusually willing to go to bat for his boys."

Mr. Gill, now an assistant professor of Economics and the head tutor in Ec 1, got a full-scale dose of the problems of college administration very quickly after graduating from Harvard. In 1950, after studying a year abroad on a Henry fellowship, he began work as assistant dean of the College, under Wilbur J. Bender. Harvard had not yet instituted the Allston Burr Senior Tutorships in the Houses, and so the administrative chores for the entire College were handled in University Hall. The load was not, as it is now, divided between the various House offices; and it naturally presented a formidable burden. Mr. Gill and the two other assistant deans each looked after slightly more than 1000 students. As Senior Tutor of Leverett, a position which he has held since 1955, he spends only slightly less time handling the concerns of 440.

But the most impressive feat of Mr. Gill's work at Harvard did not concern the problems of shepherding individual students through the maze of requirements and restrictions which impedes their progress toward a degree. Rather, it was to supply much of the initiative for a rather fundamental revision in the College's tutorial programs.

Before the present system was instituted, the College treated its students in two rather radically different ways, depending on whether it classed them as "Honors" or "non-Honors" concentrators. Though practices varied widely from department to department, the general rule was that only Honors concentrators could get tutorial and write a thesis. The departments, rather than the students, decided who was "Honors" and who wasn't.

Primarily because he felt that the academic calibre of the average Harvard student had risen high enough to lessen the need for an artificially imposed Honors-non-Honors distinction, Gill suggested that the choice of whether or not to write a thesis should be left to the students themselves. After discussing the idea with several members of the Committee on Educational Policy, he set about the intricate task of writing down the exact provisions that would most satisfactorily embody the idea, and of convincing the other members of the Faculty that the idea was a good one. Though the "Gill plan" was almost killed by floor-debate at a mid-winter Faculty meeting, early the next spring it was approved almost unanimously. The entire process of getting it passed reminded many observers of the machinations by which laws are made in Congress.

Gill will take over the Leverett Mastership in the beginning of next summer. In part, he hopes to administer the House on the same principle which he worked from during the past two or three years--that Harvard students today are intelligent and ought to make their own decisions. In his words, "The House should give a feeling of support, rather than impose a pattern, on ventures taken up by the undergraduates." He considers the most important benefit the House system can offer a student to be the contact with other undergraduates, and he sees the dining hall conversation, perhaps even more than residential tutorial system, as the single most fundamental aspect of a House.