No Rationing Needed

Harvard men are being stranded on the assembly line of speed-up education. The decision to limit summer tutorial to Senior thesis writers strikes a crippling blow at the most distinguishing feature of Harvard education. Some plan must be devised to prevent the tutorial system from being rationed for the benefit of only a few selected students, with divisional preparation for the majority simply a matter of choosing from a list of books. Tutorial should be the last to be discarded, not the first.

University Hall is reluctantly recommending retrenchment because of a diminishing staff, and because it fears accelerated students will not have time to do tutorial work. With departments like Government and Economics dwindling away before its eyes, with the possibility of a decreasing income, and with the danger that young teaching recruits will be recruited by a higher authority, the Dean's Office is apprehensive that there will not be enough tutors to go around. Granting that the draft will gradually reduce the annual 334,000 potential teacher supply, such a great total should supply sufficient qualified instructors. Already the Economics department has received more applications for teaching jobs than it can fill. New men, however, are not the whole answer to the problem. Most of the older members of the Faculty take no part in the tutorial system. Only 20 full professors are tutors. While many of these men have schedules which are at present well-filled with jaunts to Washington, many could doubtless find some time for tutoring. Usually they devote many hours to graduate students, but local draft boards are cooperating to relieve them of that burden. With the prospect of the largest Freshman class in Harvard's history being selected from 2100 applicants, the financial bogey seems to be repelled for the time being. For the students Summer School will mean the same two hours of classes daily, the same hectic last-minute cramming for exams, and surely most undergraduates can take enough hours from bridge or free summer weekends to do tutorial reading.

With tutors drawn from busy or simply disinterested Faculty members, and students faced with heavy accelerated course reading, the traditional individual supervision and discussion probably cannot continue. But by some method of small group meetings, such as the very successful inter-departmental conferences held in Eliot House this year, the hours of these hard-pressed professors and instructors would be judiciously used, and the basic framework of tutorial would be retained. Students of all rank groups should be willing to do a more evenly standardized volume of work with the possibility of a two-course reduction reward. This scheme is a deviation from tutorial as we know it, but it would meet the basic problems and enable tutorial to be continued this summer instead of being shelved.

For the many men planning to graduate next February or June, the absence of supervised tutorial this summer would be an insuperable burden. If limited to Seniors this summer and further restricted to men in Group IV or better next fall, the tutorial system in reality will have practically vanished. The group discussion method suggested for the next few months, while not a panacea nor even a proper substitute for the old plan, might well be expanded into a full wartime tutorial system. The possibilities of this will be discussed later. Right now it is essential that some arrangement be drawn up to permit the universal continuation of tutorial for the three upper classes, or else the Harvard tradition of liberal education will be in jeopardy.