House Tutors Granted Interhouse Privileges

House tutors will be able to receive passes to eat at other houses next term as a result of a decision made by the house masters last spring.

Currently if tutors wish to eat their meals--which they receive free--anywhere but at their affiliated houses, they must inform the checker at their dining hall who in turn calls ahead so the other dining hall checker will expect the tutor, dining services officials said.

But few tutors know about the rule and many have complained to the house masters that they cannot eat interhouse. The new policy, which should be implemented by reading period, will replace the phone calls with more convenient passes to expeditate and publicize the process.

"The tutors in the house came up with the idea," Lowell House Master William H. Bossert said, who presented the idea last April. "They said it's tough for them to go to academic tables in other houses. I don't consider it as a convenience or social thing but to serve an academic purpose."

Bossert said tutors also wanted to eat with students in their tutorials who came from other houses.

House masters said they will probably give each tutor a pass a week to eat interhouse, to insure that tutors keep interacting with students in their own houses.

Some tutors said that in the past they have paid the regular rate to attend academic tables outside their own houses. A few houses pay for visitors, however, including tutors from other houses.

"It will facilitate student getting together with teachers, which doesn't happen enough as it is," Dunster House resident tutor David M. Mednicoff, who teaches a sophomore Government tutorial which includes students from other houses.

"Since part of the purpose of the sophomore tutor is to make students feel more comfortable here, it's important to have close and informal contact with students," he said. "But in the four years I've been teaching the tutorial, there are several students who haven't been in the house with whom I've had less contact."

Houses pay their dining halls for meals for tutors, who are usually allowed five to 15 meals a week, depending on house and rank. The passes in the new system will keep track of the money dining halls will transfer to each other every time a tutor eats at another house, just as the check sheets keep track of students from other houses.

Bossert said he recently sent drafts of the meal passes to the Department of Dining Services--the final step before the system is implemented--though Weissbecker said he hadn't received them yet.