Tutor the Faculty

The language of the tutorial reforms passed by the Faculty last April is clear. It requires every faculty member to lead at least one tutorial. But faculty members in the larger departments offering tutorials--English, History and Economics--insist on misreading or, more likely, ignoring the reforms.

The legislation is aimed at involving the Faculty more actively, particularly in the sophomore and junior tutorial programs. The programs are now handled almost exclusively by graduate students. But the legislation defines senior thesis direction as part of the tutorial program and most professors who do agree to teach a tutorial have used this option as the easiest way out.

None of the three departments can report increases in the number of professor-taught sophomore or junior tutorials.

Many professors argue that they must trade in a lecture course to find the time to teach a tutorial. But several professors, including Glen W. Bowersock '57, associate dean of undergraduate education, have managed to squeeze tutorials into their schedules without sacrificing their lecture courses.

Perhaps worse, department heads nonchalantly accept their colleagues' blatant evasion of tutorial responsibility. Without exception, they admit they have not considered how they might enforce the regulations in the future. One wonders why the Faculty devoted so much of their precious committee time to disputing the fine points of the legislation when they had no intention of obeying the basic premise of the reforms.

In the hands of departmental heads then, the legislation is a dead letter. But the reforms did set up a student-faculty committee to review regularly the tutorial program and report discrepancies to the dean's office. These committees must act forcefully, persistently and without delay if tutorial reform is ever to benefit Harvard's students.