The Faculty And Tutorials

WHILE FACULTY members often point to the passage of the Core Curriculum as evidence of their committment to undergraduate education, their chronic refusal to assume the burden of tutorial instruction reveals the shallowness of that commitment.

The Faculty Council may take a step toward remedying its non-committal image next week if it approves the reforms in tutorial legislation recommended by Glen W. Bowersock '57, associate dean of the Faculty for undergraduate education. These proposed reforms seek to combat the gross discrepancies between stated University policy and actual practice by requiring professors to teach more tutorials.

One of the reforms would allow fewer graduate students to lead tutorials. In fact, the restrictions simply recognize long-standing but blatantly disregarded legislation on the tutorial system. In 1958, the Faculty passed legislation, still on the books, which requires that no more than 30 per cent of a department's tutors be teaching fellows and no less than 30 per cent be full-time Faculty members. However, 17 years later, Dean Rosovsky's task force on concentrations observed that these limits, particularly in larger concentrations, have gone unenforced.

The tutorial reforms before the Faculty Council propose that every full-time Faculty member teach a minimum of one tutorial a term. This reform compels a real commitment to excellence in undergraduate education--professors would have to take an active role in the learning process on the most basic level, by discussing their field of expertise with the students themselves.

In larger concentrations, which must contend with a higher student-Faculty ratio, the reforms recommend that the departments offer special junior seminars conducted by Faculty members as an alternative to junior tutorials taught by teaching fellows. The seminars would contain a larger number of students than tutorials, thus sacrificing some of the intimacy of the small-group approach. Nevertheless, the seminar proposal would allow students the freedom to choose between small-group instruction and contact with an experienced professor.

Another reform which recommends that professors regularly oversee the progress of tutorial work would help promote more conscientious tutorial supervision.

IT REMAINS UNCLEAR whether these reforms can be any more effectively enforced than the 1958 tutorial legislation. The reforms would include a clause providing for student-Faculty committees in each department to review the tutorials and notify the appropriate administrators when they fail to comply with the legislation.

How much clout such committees would command is questionable. Faculty Council members this week requested that the reforms clearly state that students on the committee serve on a strictly advisory basis. As a result, Faculty members on each committee would have sole responsibility to enforce tutorial policy in their own departments; they would serve as their own judges.

The Faculty members appointed to the committees should try to foster the original goals of the reforms and not use the committees to block increased Faculty participation in tutorials. The reforms will be useless unless the Faculty cooperates.