On the Harvard Dole

I WAS EVICTED last week from Dunster House, and it wasn't pretty. I was a squatter in I-entry--living with just a few clothes, a bedspread and a pillow. I was busy writing for The Crimson's Commencement issues. I figured that when dorm crew came, I would tidy my stuff on my bed and leave.

The superintendent did not like that plan.

First he sent dorm crew kids with mops and scrubbers and brooms. Then painters, a locksmith and window people. Finally I was awakened one morning by a man standing over my bed bellowing in Spanish.

After I left that day, my clothes and bedding were confiscated. Someone in the super's office told me I could reclaim them by surrendering my keys. If I was caught in my room again, they said, they would change the locks.

This did not surprise me. I didn't think staying past deadline was a big deal, but I was in fact breaking College rules. The super was just doing his job.

I wouldn't have given this much further thought if my eye had not fallen upon the nameplate of a first-floor room in my entry as I was moving out. It was the tutor's suite. The lights were on.

Tutors, you see, need not adhere to any ordinary restrictions on College housing. Their suites are available year-round, if they are returning for another term. And even if they are quitting or have not been rehired, they have until July 1 to move out.

LIKE MANY STUDENTS, I have been disappointed by the advising network at Harvard. My proctor in Grays West, a decent person who had lived in that entry for 22 years, was an admissions officer. Even in the turmoil of my first term at the College, he had virtually no comment while signing my study card.

In Dunster, I have also found the tutor system to be lacking. Besides the senior tutor, only two of the dozen or more tutors even know me by name. I haven't engaged with any of them over some intellectual matter. I haven't received course advice from them, or had a fresh insight into a tutor's field of study.

In plain terms, the tutor system is a failure. At a College which assumes that the houses are adequate to meet the social and outside-the-classroom intellectual needs of its students (and thus consistently puts off building a student center), tutors have an enormous responsibility conferred upon them.

As far as I can tell, they haven't even begun to live up to it. The Committee on House Life this year has taken up the issue of recharging intellectual life in the houses. House seminars and discussion tables are oft-cited means of working toward that end.

Still, I've yet to see any College or house official recognize the prevalent opinion among undergraduates--that drastic action and a complete overhaul is necessary to revive the tutor system.

The irony in my eviction last week is apparent. I paid thousands of dollars for housing this year and was given very little slack by the house when I needed a place to live for a few extra days.

My entry tutor, on the other hand, lives in Dunster for free, has two large rooms and a bathroom at her disposal--all with almost no restrictions. This is the same tutor I've spotted outside the suite only four or five times the entire year (once in the dining hall, once while breaking up a party in my room, two or three times at study breaks).

Tutors complain that students do not take the initiative in getting to know them. Perhaps that's true. But if any of the tutors were to learn my name, and make themselves available, I might be more inclined to do so.

Granted, my entry tutor is a doctor in residence at a Boston hospital--not the kind of job that provides excess leisure time. But regardless of profession, it seems to me Dunster tutors have a minimal commitment to the house. The effort expended by the four grill managers and the two house committee chairs to foster a sense of community in Dunster dwarfs anything I've seen on the part of the tutors.

The College can't expect students to be passive about such a crisis in incompetence, given the enormous allocation of resources behind the tutor system. To start, there is the rooming issue.

Forget my eviction for the moment. Even during the year, tutors claim entire suites as a matter of course--about 30 total rooms in Dunster House for 14 tutors. In a house that expects sophomores to live in rooms barely larger than sandboxes, this is an outrage. Over crowding will be even worse next year since fewer than expected students will take time off.

The other perk of tutoring is free meals in the dining hall. Resident tutors in Dunster are allowed 14 free meals a week, and non-residents are allocated five. According to Dining Services Director Michael P. Berry, Harvard spends $640,000 in all the houses to feed non-students. This figure includes senior tutors and their families, masters, etc.

But a quick look around the dining hall makes it clear who is eating the bulk of that food. Carol Finn, Dunster's assistant to the masters, says that the tutors manage to polish off their allotted meals quite well.

I have been urged by fellow Dunsterites not to make this condemnation of the tutors too broad in scope. One physics tutor has a regular tutoring night each week. There are several foreign language tables as well. A number of students regularly comes to the defense of the fellowships tutor, who, I concede, is one of the two tutors who knows my name. I checked on her job. On top of the standard tutor perks, she received $6000 last year for her services. The other tutor who knows my name, by the way, also receives a substantial salary as assistant senior tutor.

TWO YEARS AGO, after I wrote an editorial bemoaning the inefficiency of library security, I was approached by someone who told me he was very disturbed by my article. It seemed as though I regarded people as commodities, he said, referring to my suggestion that the book checkers be put to work doing something more useful.

I expect that he'll have the same reaction to my argument here. I am saying, after all, that tutors are dead weight, that the undergraduates are paying out of their ears for a system that doesn't work and that action should be taken to cure this ill.

I am sensitive to the predicament of graduate students, who often have too little money and too much work.

But Harvard is a place with high expectations. I am expected to pay tuition and expenses of about $22,000. I am expected to complete my course work and behave by the standards becoming a Harvard student.

And, as I've found out, I'm expected to move out of my room by the last day of exams. If I fail to live up to any of these standards, the College or Dunster House takes action--and quick.

The tutors, however, are not held to any standards which are even vaguely comparable. I did have a chance to complete a tutor evaluation several weeks ago, but, despite scathing remarks about the absence of my tutor from any role in the house, she has been rehired for next year.

Tutoring, in its ideal form, is not an easy job, and I have been told that recruiting capable tutors is difficult. This I understand. But if this is the case, perhaps it is time for abandoning the system altogether. As it is now, there is a certain fixed number of spaces for tutors to be filled each year. Why not be more flexible and hire only those tutors who seem capable of living up to their commitments?

Keep the senior tutors and a few assistants. Kick the rest out. Since just about any Harvard undergraduate will tell you that our peers teach us more than any tutor ever has, allow more common space in the house for students to congregate. Right now the only places like that in Dunster are the courtyard (available only in nice weather) and the grill, which is stuck in the bowels of the house tunnels. Let Mike Berry funnel his enormous budget for tutor food to the grills.

In cold economic terms, I am a customer paying Harvard extensive monies for services which are not being rendered. But in a more human sense, I am a student at a University which I trust to spend my tuition money to best educate me. If there were unlimited resources, I would not begrudge grad students the chance to scam Harvard for free food and housing. But that scam comes at a sacrifice--a sacrifice borne by undergraduates.