A Few Tutors Too Many

Harvard may be long way from Ithaca but heroic-age Greece and modern-age academia have at least a few things in common Just as Penelope's suitors descended on her house, dissipating her resources, Harvard's undergraduate houses are bearing the expense of a similar class

They're called resident tutors.

Resident tutors get free room and board in exchange for little more, it seems than accepting these benefits. They take care of very few tasks that couldn't be done just as well and much more cheaply by non-resident tutors.

And what exactly does the job of a resident tutor entail? One of the more obvious contributions they make is their work as pre-med and pre-law advisors. They also write recommendations for students and lead house tutorials. But do they really have to live in house tutorials. But do they really have to live in house to perform such jobs? Evidently Harvard doesn't think so, since non-resident tutors often take on these same tasks.

Are they there to counsel students? From ECHO to contact to PCC, Harvard already has a myraid of full-service counseling operations that are specifically set upto deal with the most common and compelling problems which students face, Is a student with an eating disorder more likely to turn to a trained peer counselor or a cranky statistics grad student with a dissertation chapter due the next day?

In any case, do we need one tutor per entry-way? Over the last thirty years the number of resident tutors has increased from a handful to about 20 per house. I know that Harvard students are given to melodramatic exaggeration of their neuroses, but retaining one full time resident tutor for every 20 students is excessive. One could make the case that resident tutors keep the peace and insure a modicum of discipline. But considering Harvard's dormant social scene, such a task could not keep more than one nights per week. Indeed, the place where I seem to run into tutors the most is on the keg line at parties.

Earnest concern with peace and quiet only seems to come into play when a tutor has a clutch of toddlers to pacify. Needless to say, this concern does not extend into the dining hall, where the litter of spirited youngsters screeches, cries, and spits up a cacophonous bedlam.

Resident tutors serve, to some degree, to help students in their area of expertise. Unfortunately, even with hordes of tutors in the Houses, on house, will have a tutor for every student's academic discipline. In practice, this function is not given a tremendously high priority, since plenty of tutors get posts even through there is little or no call for their academic expertise for example, Winthrop House has two Fine Arts tutors, but no tutors in Economics, Math, or Physics.

In any case the whole issue comes back to the same fundamental question: Is it worth the space and expense to have a spotty, incomplete and informal network of live-in academic advising? Though departmental tutors may live in far-away Somerville, modern technology leaves them only a phone call away.

In Winthrop House we have eighteen tutors who with their families constitute a population of about 25 adults and children. These figures come from a house that is home to less than 400 students. Overcrowding is rife, yet as students suffer the small and dingy rooms, the tutor population proliferates.

Students can't even keep pets, let alone spouses or children. Harvard's tutors, however, have the privilege of suckling their entire families at the breast of Mother Harvard. The houses should first and foremost be student dormitories; they should not be the bedroom communities of the academic welfare state. Harvard propaganda claims that it is tutors that distinguish our houses from mere dorms--this is the same outrageous intellectual pretension that leads us to call majors "concentrations." Buildings where college students live are "dorms" no matter how intellectually over qualified the RAs who live there.

The ample space that resident tutors occupy could be used to ease perennial overcrowding. Or, as the University might prefer, we could use the suites to house more students. In either case, the benefits to undergraduates -- either more space or lower tuition unquestionably out-weigh the loss of a few resident tutors. After all who wouldn't reject his or her tutor in exchange for a single bedroom of a few hundred dollars off tuition.

This isn't to say that resident tutors aren't nice people, or that they undertake the job with the devious intention of siphoning off undergraduate resources. I have rarely met a tutor who was not likable. It's just that I'm not in the habit of paying to put up my friends.

Resident tutorship is a subsidy--undergraduates pay for graduate students to live in the houses. Tutors have told me that they regard their post as a mini-fellowship. My experience on a tutor selection committee bears this out. Applicants were more likely to vaunt their Rhodes and Marshall scholarships than their experience as a camp counselor, advisor, or teacher.

Students, tutors, and administrators must recognize that there is no getting around this conclusion. Undergraduate dollars help pay for tutors who receive free room and board in return for nominal and perfunctory services.

Perhaps such mini-fellowships are a good idea; they need to be debated on their merits. It is profoundly dishonest, however, to cloak this subsidy with the mantle of benefiting the students.

I have a recurring nightmare that goes something like this: A polygamous tutor moves in, and takes more and more wives, with whom he has more and more children, until the family takes over the who of Gore Hall. Their fecundity forces a mass of displaced students to live in the laundry rooms.

This nightmare is too close to reality for comfort. If undergraduates are ever to expect the university to spend their money judiciously, they must stand up to wasteful programs. Paring down the resident tutorial staff will painlessly save money.

Even an economics tutor could tell you that.