Phi Beta Kappa: Who Needs It?

Forgetting the tradition that an August occasion is an empty occasion, President Bunting and President Pusey said some intelligent things about Phi Beta Kappa a week ago at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Radcliffe chapter of PBK.

Greeting the initiates of the Radcliffe chapter and the established members in the Harvard community, Mrs. Bunting observed that the goal of membership in PBK probably does not stimulate anyone to academic achievement. Election is "recognition after the fact," she said, a reward for work well done.

Mr. Pusey suggested that PBK may have outlived its original function, which was to draw attention to the academic side of college life. At Harvard academics get enough attention without any help from PBK, and perhaps it is time for the fraternity to find another function.

Lately, some Faculty members (including at least one Allston Burr Senior Tutor) and even undergraduate PBK members have also complained sub rosa about Harvard's chapter of PBK. Disgruntled with some choices, they have criticized election procedures.

Naming the Elect

Harvard's chapter is unique in PBK because the undergraduate members choose their successors. At all other colleges, the dean announces the eight or sixteen people who have the highest grades in their class, and that is that. At Harvard, seven "Graduates," including some faculty members, the graduate secretary of the chapter, and a dean representing the Administration, are supposed to assist at each election, and they, like the undergraduates, have one vote each. In practice, those "Graduates" that come to elections generally just supply information when asked.

At the elections of the Junior Eight and Senior Sixteen, the candidates are those with the highest grade averages in their class; there are slightly more than twice as many of them as there are places to fill. The electors have before them each candidate's grade average and grade distribution, the comments of tutors and Senior Tutor, the extracurricular activities (of which the House office is aware), the courses taken, and the grade received in each.

The electors go through the list three times. The first time they try to classify the candidates as obviously electable, possible, and below par. (This, in itself, is no mean trick when all the candidates are at the top of a class of a thousand Harvard men.) They then go through again, raising or lowering the ranks of disputed candidates. Finally, they try to reduce the number of obvious candidates to the number permitted for election.

The discussion of individual candidates is usually on an extraordinarily high plane--at least when compared with elections in several other, fairly exclusive undergraduate organizations. The difficulty is: what are to be the criteria of election?

According to the handbook for new members of PBK, election means "recognition of intellectual capacities well employed, especially in the acquiring of an education in the liberal arts and sciences." Instructions to the electors interpert "intellectual capacities well employed" more narrowly as "scholarship." "Good character" is also relevant (PBK presumably excludes outright criminals), but the phrase "achievement in extracurricular activities" is an anathema.

The emphasis on academic achievement, equated to scholarship, and on the least ambiguous measure of it, grades, forces many undergraduate electors to play a curious game during elections. Before and after the election meeting, and during the break in discussions, they admit how arbitrary, capricious, and generally insignificant grades are as measures of interest, talent, and achievement in most of the courses they have taken. Yet when they enter the conference room on the tenth floor of Holyoke Center, they are faced with grade averages calculated to five digits, and they must pretend that an A instead of an A- in this course or that is a sure sign of intellectual capacities better employed. They have to play this game because academic achievement is defined as the principal criterion of intellectual capacity. If the tutor's comments are uninformed and uninformative, as they often are, and no undergraduate member knows the candidate, grades are the only bit of information left.

The game is particularly aggravating when, as is often the case, the candidate has Advanced Standing or has taken a leave and has been in the College for only a year and a half. Then, many feel, even the grades are too few to be reliable, and the ordinary juniors are at a comparative disadvantage. But this is an internal problem of PBK. The more general problem of criteria of choice remains.

The translation of "intellectual capacities well employed" into "scholarship" measured largely by grades is the focal point of Mr. Pusey's suggestions and of faculty compliants. Yet I suspect they are dissatisfied for directly opposite reasons.

Senior Tutor X, let us call him, devotes much time and care to preparing recommendations for the candidates in his House. The morning after the election, he finds that the choices have conformed strictly to neither grades nor his recommendations. To eliminate this funny business, he would like elections to PBK postponed from their present premature dates in the Harvard career, to the end of the senior year when all academic scores are in. He would like the decisions made by professors, or at least the "Graduates," acting on the presumption that election is based on numerical rank unless there is some extraordinary reason for deviating from it.

Postponing the elections is now a constitutional impossibility. Greater control of the elections by the "Graduates" is not: legally a majority of three-quarters is required to elect a member, and a "Graduate" block of seven votes could effect a veto at elections of the Eight and Sixteen.

Unfortunately, even if, behind locked doors, they admit to each other the weaknesses of grades as measures of intellect, academics are still likely to select as outstanding that which elevated them to their present high position: namely, academic prowess.

But, I believe, the University already offers enough carrots to the donkey of academic achievement. There are Detur prizes and scholarships; programs for Honors candidates which ration out contact with the faculty to the blessed only; and summas, magnas, and cums.

Realizing this, several undergraduate PBK members have suggested abolishing the chapter. However, Harvard's chapter was founded in 1781; Harvard institutions never die, they just become toxic. So this proposal is impracticable.

Letting the chapter atrophy of its own uselessness would be all right if election were merely on the basis of grades. However, since other criteria are used erratically, elections become irrational, and perhaps even pernicious in their effects.

Some Modest Proposals

There is a function which no Harvard institution serves, and that is to encourage intellectual breadth. Mr. Pusey, I hope, had in mind that good use of the intellect includes more than applying it to curriculum, and that PBK might reward this broader use.

How to save this idea from hopeless vagueness? Three obvious steps might be easily implemented. All three would make the criteria of election less a checklist and more an evaluation of overall intellectual capacity. These suggestions would make elections harder, not easier, but perhaps would also make them worth the trouble.

First, PBK should explicitly and consistently encourage breadth of academic endeavor. The electors are often faced with choosing between the all-A physicist and one who has gotten all A's and a B in a history course. Since they may be assured that the physics department will reward the all-A man, they should make PBK one place (and it would be the only place in the College) where the experimenter is rewarded.

Second, PBK should construct the requirement of "good character" broadly enough to include extracurricular activities which reveal intellectual capacities well employed. Good acting, good writing, good artwork and music-making, good politicking, and good service of one's fellows, can all be evidence at least as clear as a cipher in the registrar's office.

The electors could easily recognize that some activities are no more a sign of intellectual capacity than an A in Chemistry 20. They would compare not activity per se, but the quality of performance in extracurricular interest: writing, even if not for a magazine; performing, even if not with a group.

Third, PBK should make sure that an elector concentrating in the candidates field and another elector in the candidate's House talk with each candidate about his interests before the elections of the Eight and Sixteen. Unless a candidate leads his class, if no one in PBK knows him he is at a severe disadvantage. Perhaps he is doing independent work, connected with or unrelated to his field, that not even his tutor knows about. Perhaps his tutor doesn't know him, as is usually the case with mathematicians. On the other hand perhaps he studies nothing but Serbo-Croatian, his major, all day and all night and has an IQ of 105.

PBK could preserve the secrecy which traditionally surrounds its elections by telling electors in advance just the names of the one or two people they are to interview. It could prevent the interviews (ideally, din-