Faculty Profile

Hugh Cabot has made a career of helping people to solve their problems. After fifteen years as an investment counsellor and industrial relations export, Cabot decided that the key to the failures he had seen was a lack of "education for life." It was at the college level, Cabot thought, that problem-solving skills should be acquired. So he decided to adapt the techniques he had learned over the years to teaching students how to look at their experiences critically. Now a lecturer in General Education, Cabot is director of the Human Relations course, Social Sciences 112.

When Cabot left Harvard in 1928, he found that his degree in Medieval History was not going to get him a job. So he entered the Business School to take a year of economics.

He started out in the business would as a statistician, but decided to go into investment counselling in 1932. It was in the middle of the depression, but the Cromwell and Cabot Corporation became a huge success.

All this time, Cabot had let his partners handle most of the technical problems, while he was beginning his work in human relations. His dealings with labor and management conflicts during this period convinced him that higher education could contribute to the solution of these individual-group problems.

But Pearl Harbor occurred before Cabot could put his ideas into operation. His reputation as a trouble shooter prompted the War Department to ask for his services, and Cabot went to work as a civilian advisor to the Quartermaster Corps. His first big assignment was to straighten out a personnel problem at the Tank Automotive Center in Detroit. Discord among the four thousand men had been slowing up the plant's production. When Cabot got through, the plant ran smoothly again and everyone was content. He left the War Department in 1945, after successfully completing his government duties.

Cabot returned to Harvard in '47 and got his degree in Human Relations at the Business School. Since then, he has been a research fellow and now the director of Social Sciences 112, a discussion course based on the "case study" method.

Cabot himself looks more like an artist than a professor. Almost any day you can see him walking through the Yard with a group of students. He will be wearing his light green top coat and pulled-down hat. In one hand he will be carrying his brief case, and in the other his inevitable cigarette-holder. He likes music and the theatre, but "Working with people is my major interest, so that's how I spend most of my time. My teaching isn't separate from my life." Now that his course has become well-established at Harvard, Cabot wants to interest other schools in his techniques and urge them to introduce human relations courses. Many college have done this already.

Cabot has also prepared a set of mimeographed notes in which he discusses the course and correlates outside reading material. These will soon come out in book form. "But," Cabot says, "the only trouble with that is the book will be out of date as soon as it's published. We're constantly experimenting with new techniques and methods of teaching, and sometimes the students teach us more than we teach them. The thing is, there can be no fixed body of fact in a course dealing with life."

He considers the individual conferences he has with many students a necessary part of the course. When Cabot sees a student disturbed-by a problem, he will invite him to his office. After one of these sessions, students come to see him of their own accord. Through discussion of each person's ideas and problems, Cabot has been able to take many people over hurdles they meet in the course and in their lives.

"The only prerequisite for the course," Cabot says, "is the student's having lived. But what is more important, he must be willing to look at his experience critically. There's where the tough part comes in. Not everyone is willing to sit down and find out about himself, and part of my job is to make this interesting."