SUBJECT SLIP-UP

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Your story on the teaching fellows' organizational meeting of December 12 quoted a remark of mine out of context, with dismaying results.

I said that although my own working conditions were splendid, a great many teaching fellows -- particularly those who sectioned large Gen Ed courses -- were forced to cope with "alien material imposed on them by the professors, which neither they nor their students go for," and which they had to spend their section meetings "unteaching."

Your reporter got the predicate right, but unfortunately slipped up on the subject. Without the qualifying clause in the beginning, my complaint appeared very vividly and bitterly personal.

Many people who knew that I am presently sectioning Professor Michael Walzer's course on Contemporary Political Theory (Gov 104) read the remark as a personal attack. This has been particularly depressing to me, because Professor Walzer is the last person I would want to attack: working with him in the last few months is the most exciting thing that has happened to me academically in four years at Harvard.

I must say, however, that few of my friends and colleagues over the years have been as lucky as I. Many of us who are organizing feel that if teaching fellows had more freedom in their work, and could take more personal initiative, both the fun and the quality of teaching would rise sharply. Then the general quality of undergraduate education at Harvard might not depend so much on luck as it does now. Marshall Berman   Teaching Fellow in Government