A TEACHING FELLOW'S VIEW

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The demoralizing report of the Overseers' Committee criticizing the teaching fellows program at Harvard contains further depressing evidence that the values of official Harvard are those of the commercial society rather than those usually associated with an intellectual community.

Obeisance to the norms and methods of Madison Avenue has long been evident in the annual advertisements by the Admissions Office as to the numbers of worthy applicants that have been rejected; and in the purple prose which the administrative and medical staff writes for consumption by the gutter press and which follows the lead of the cigarette companies in seeking to identify success in love with the corporate product.

The necessary connection between levels of academic pay and those of academic competence which the Overseers Committee implies, is indicative of a more pervasive adoption of materialistic standards.

What is doubly depressing is that these standards are applied with so little competence and that the Committee's facts are poor, its logic faulty and its recommendations are largely vacuous.

Effective pecuniary returns to teaching fellows are rather different from those on which the Committee bases its recommendations. The fringe benefits of Staff Tuition Fellowships and Resident Tutorships in Harvard Houses are often enjoyed by teaching fellows and can serve to raise very considerably the pay per hour of time expanded. On the other hand, teaching fellow salaries are taxable whereas they could easily be made exempt by labeling the program one of financial aid, as the Committee assumes it to be. Further, it can make good business sense to become a teaching fellow at Harvard as the prestige attaching to the institution's reputation for competent teaching may enhance future pay.

These facts on balance suggest that although the pay is low it is not drastically so and that acceptance of a teaching fellowship should not necessarily call into question one's virility and vitality. There is no need, therefore, for section men to prove their manhood by attacking all the "Cliffies" in their sections, as one member of the Committee seems to suggest that they should. (The only alternative interpretation of his remarks is that a high income is required to avoid celibacy at Harvard and recent official utterances suggest that an undergraduate's allowance is adequate to finance promiscuity here.)

The Committee's Parkinsonian recommendation that yet another dean be appointed, which is the standard remedy of the unimaginative bureaucrat, not only stands as witness to the sterility of its discussions, but its members highlight the incompetence of their research by demonstrating quite clearly that they checked only faculty and student opinions and forgot to check out the teaching fellows themselves. The Committee is clearly unaware that major attractions of the job are the acceptance of responsibility, the opportunity to test one's own ideas and the chance to establish unstructured and informal support with students, all of which are more or less incompatible with close supervisions.

Teaching fellows unquestionably deserve a better deal from the University and probably need an outside prop to obtain it in the form of more pay for less work, for the Corporation has an over riding bargaining advantage as the greater of degrees. The gracious and insulting argumentum ad bominom which is contained in the report of the Overseers' Committee and the undesirability of the "senior Faculty person" whom the Committee seeks to set over them, decract from the attractiveness of its later recommendations.