FACULTY STUDENT RELATIONSHIPS

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The article "For Faculty It's Still Old Mood on Campus" left me, enraged. I'll try to explain why. In general it seemed to me that faculty members interviewed recognized the same problems (in faculty-student relations) that students do but that many tried to shift the blame to students in unfair ways.

Robert Kiely is right that student-faculty relationships are mostly "contention." I believe this is because a student has to fight Harvard (its bureaucracy, inane rules, bad courses, etc.) constantly if she or he wants an education. Ask (almost) any student.

Oscar Handlin notes that faculty-student relations before 1969 "later came to seem paternalistic." They were paternalistic. Paternalism seems to be what Harvey Mansfield longs for: he complains that faculty members don't get the respect due to age, learning, and position. In my experience they get this respect--probably Mansfield misses the traditional teacher-student relationship, with its deep respect, admiration, and obligation.

Why is this old teacher-student relationship absent? To quote Handlin again, "Now we work according to customer and client obligation. You do what is required and you don't do anything more." This is the reason. So many professors do the bare minimum required--the contempt they have for students, and for education itself, makes me furious.

The great irony is that Handlin continues. "Undergraduates don't realize that there's something personal missing." We don't realize? This lack is a daily disappointment to students. I hear complaints every day; it may be the biggest problem here.

Many of the professors quoted think that contact with students is impossible or pointless. If they're right, then Harvard is not what we think it is; admissions brochures should advertise a student faculty ratio of us thousand to none.

Maybe the real problem lies with complaints like Mansfield's--students dress funny; they talk funny. I would like to offer that (1) when I go to dine at the Faculty Club I'll put on a jacket and tie; Dr. Mansfield at a House could take his off; (2) a professor with an English vocabulary of one hundred thousand words (I'm guessing) could bestir himself to learn ten or twenty more, "vogue" as they may be.

Don't take this as a general attack on the faculty, because most I've known have tried to keep good faculty student relations. David Riesman is right at least in that Harvard can't offer some things that Swarthmore can--but Harvard can offer still less if professors don't try, and don't care. Jonathan S. Watson '73/5