House Seminars

House Seminars have accumulated interested students and willing teachers, and a list of shortcomings varying in significance. Perhaps they have concentrated a little heavily on Africa, and certainly they have done little to offer tutorial for non-Honors, but the real disappointment has been their failure to strengthen Harvard's ties with the non-academic community by bringing interesting local figures into the Houses.

This matters simply because very little contact of this sort now exists, and there is almost no chance for undergraduates to meet intelligent members of the local community in a fruitful way. In a College where growing contact and sympathy between student and Faculty make academic careers more and more natural, injection of the non-academic perspective would be an invaluable and otherwise unavailable leavening of education.

Finding community leaders and businessmen interested in conducting seminars is difficult, as unproductive efforts in a few Houses have already shown. Yet House Seminars can be more than an addition to course offerings: they can present a new sense of what the world is like outside the College, if they over-come the temptation to merely offer more semi-academic training. The effort is very much worth making.