Juniors Abandoned

Individual tutorial instruction has long been regarded, by undergraduates and faculty alike, as the touchstone of a Harvard education. The unique advantage of tutorial lies in its flexibility for challenging the student at his own particular level of ability and allowing him to concentrate his energies in areas of study which he finds most congenial.

These purposes have been ill-served by the recent decision of the History Department to substitute group tutorial for individual tutorial at the junior (History 98) level. As now constituted, tutorial groups will include three to four students, and in some rare cases, as many as five.

To a considerable degree the Department has been forced to this decision by circumstances beyond its control. It had no way of foreseeing the extraordinarily large increase in the number of concentrators which has occurred; nor could it have expected the dropouts and leaves of absence among graduate students which have (at least temporarily) depleted its pool of potential tutors. One policy decision of the Department, however, has served to aggravate the situation.

The Department will continue to include supplementary section meetings in several middle-level history courses. In this way, a considerable portion of the teaching time of some of the department's most talented graduate students--these section men are often the recipients of special, five-year fellowships--is diverted from tutorial to section instruction. This allocation of resources is unfortunate.

It seems an inescapable fact of Harvard life that sections are a desultory and largely unsatisfactory educational experience. The teaching ability of section men is not the main issue here; rather, the fault often lies with the unwillingness of undergraduates to do the reading which would make sections more profitable. Such failures of motivation occur less frequently in junior tutorial.

Further, middle-level history courses are often highly popular with students in other fields, especially in the case of the Department's more fashionable offerings. The Department's first concern should be for the tutoring of its own concentrators.

Considering the number of undergraduate concentrators in history, we realize that a complete return to individual junior tutorial is impossible at the present time. Moreover we support the History Department's refusal to include in the tutorial program those graduate students who do not measure up to its standards. But by returning middle-level section men to tutorial duties the size of tutorial groups might be cut by a man or more, and this we consider a step in the right direction--towards restoring the individual tutorial program to a position of top priority within the Department.