Winthrop Resident Tutors Far from Useless

I am writing in response to Benjamin Heller's article "A Few Tutors too Many" (March 20) in which he aired his opinion that the resident tutors of Winthrop House are not performing any worthwhile function and are crowding the students. He feels that it is a waste of the students' money for tutors to live and eat in the house, and he particularly resents the fact some tutors have children whom he must also "support."

I am a resident affiliate in Winthrop. House and am the mother of two of the children whose presence Mr. Heller's finds so objectionable. My husband is the senior tutor of Winthrop House. Mr. Heller's article is wrong on all counts. It would not be worth responding to, except that his roommate authored an attack on my children and the tutorial staff last week in The Independent, and we are tired of reading these ridiculous comments based on untruths.

First of all, it is not true that the tutors are useless. My husband does many worth-while and valuable things as senior tutor, although he has never sat down with Mr. Heller and listed them for him. While I have neither the space nor the inclination to list all of the valuable services which our staff of resident tutors provides to the students, I will say that in the last 48 hours I know that one tutor counseled a student about her thesis at 3 am, another drove a student to the hospital on short notice and waited there for three hours to bring him home again and another spoke to a student about a significant health concern, a problem he was able to observe only because he lives close to the student.

Mr. Heller states that a graduate student living in Somerville might easily fulfill the role of a resident tutor at a much lower cost. I doubt, first, that one could find many graduate students who would be willing to be on 24-hour call to keep Mr. Heller's neighbors quiet when he needs to study or sleep, counsel him when he has an academic or personal problem, arbitrate conflicts with his roommates, make sure he is all right when he becomes seriously ill, let him into his room when he is locked out, write recommendations for him, advise him about his career (including helping him with his resume, inviting professionals to give him advice about interviewing, and finding professionals in the fields in which he is interested to come to the house and answer his questions), and perform countless other tasks for him and everyone else in his entry, for less than the value of a two-room suite in an undergraduate dormitory and 21 meals a week in the dining hall. But the real problem with his assertion is that it would be impossible for anyone to do those things, as he suggests, by telephone.

Mr. Heller is also wrong in stating that the tutors are crowding the students. There are two entries in Winthrop House which house more than one tutor. One of the entries is especially large and has traditionally had two tutors living in it. The other has two tutors this year through an administrative fluke, and will not have two tutors next years.

With regard to the children in Winthrop House, there are three families living there, with five children between them. None of us are taking space away from students. My family lives in the senior tutor's suite, which has never housed students. The other two families live in apartments which also have never been students' rooms.

Third, the tutors do not live or eat here for free. My husband works very long hours and very diligently as senior tutor but is paid very little. The fact that the job provides housing and some food was certainly taken into account when his pay was set. Obviously, it is marginally more expensive to the college to provide housing and food to a senior tutor with a family than to a single senior tutor.

I can only assume that the college administrators did an economic analysis of the kind Mr. Heller so appreciates and decided that it is more beneficial to hire a senior tutor on the basis of merit than on the basis of his marital and parental status. In addition, it should be noted that the other two families with children in the house pay substantial rent for the privilege of living here.

With regard to the presence of children in the house, there is one final "economic" argument which Mr. Heller fails to acknowledge, which is that the children do make a positive contribution here. Although Mr. Heller may find it incomprehensible, some people actually like children for their own sake, and consider it desirable simply to have some around. There are such students in Winthrop House and they have befriended my children.

I understand that some students do not like children. Mr. Heller's brief but insulting comments about my children's behavior in the dining hall indicate to me that even if he could be convinced that my children were not costing him anything or crowding him, he would still just rather not have them around. I assume that Mr. Heller recognizes that we are doing what we can to teach our children good manners, but that as they are one and three years old they will from time to time still "screech" in public.

I never expected the students in Winthrop House to love our sticky, trouble some children the way we do. However, I did, at least until the last few weeks, believe that we could rely on their having an attitude of kindly tolerance toward them. I wonder if Mr. Heller and those students who would simply prefer not to have children around could try to view the ordeal of having small children in the dining hall as one of life's little lessons in learning to live alongside those whom they dislike.

Although such an effort may prove daunting to someone like Mr. Heller, he could look on the new experience of cultivating an attitude of tolerance as yet another benefit of having children in the house.

I do not mean to suggest that the tutorial staff of Winthrop House is perfect and could not improve, that the staff is not open to criticism, or even that the staff should not be reduced. However, it seems doubtful that Mr. Heller's insulting, public my child throwing up on him (which unfortunately my child has never done), represents an honest effort to persuade anyone to change things. M. Page Keller   Resident Affiliate   Winthrop House