Fact and Fiction

To the Editors of The Crimson:

My wife, Diana Thomson, one of the protagonists in the controversy over dropping fiction-writing from the expository writing program (reported in The Crimson on March 6 and 7) can make her own defense, and has done so.

I write not as a spouse but as someone who has been concerned for many years about freshman-year teaching and the desperate need for excellent and caring small-group teaching in this University.

I have taught a Freshman Seminar for six years; I served for three years as a member of the Faculty Council, when the future of Expos was a central issue; I run Harvard's equivalent to a school of journalism, the Nieman Fellowships. So my interest in the topic of teaching, particularly the teaching of writing, is neither recent nor casual.

What astonishes me about the decision by the current Expos director to abolish the fiction-writing option is its wrong-headedness in going after the song-birds with a shotgun. I don't refer to the teachers, but to those students how come to the college with an ability to write and also a need--under proven, rigorous supervision--to try their voices at something other than "the expository essay."

What further astonishes me is the current director's apparent aversion to "counseling" as a part of excellent small-group teaching. What is teaching, at its very best, after all, than the interplay of people--the older ones who have the knowledge, the compassion, and the standards, and the younger ones who need all three? The current Expos director seems to disdain, even to fear, caring. Yet it is probably, in fact, for most of those freshmen who pass through his computer, the most valuable gift their teachers can give them.

The current Expos director's "solution"--to shoot down the birds that can sing, and also teachers of proven excellence and compassion--is a solution that will inflict totally unnecessary harm on Harvard/Radcliffe freshmen if he continues to prevail.

Why can't Harvard combine intellectual excellence with humaneness? Shouldn't the integration of these two qualities be our ultimate goal? James C. Thomson Jr.   Curator, Nieman Foundation