Editor, The Crimson

Dear Sir,

In 1942 I had the honor to serve the Student Council as senior chairman of its Committee on Tenure and Curriculum. In that year, as in the present, the Student Council saw in the continued decline of the tutorial system a major threat to the liberal content of Harvard education.

I shall not attempt in a letter to discuss many aspects of the problem. I wish only to remark upon two points.

One is the oft-repeated suggestion that tutorial be limited to senior honors candidates or to men in group III and higher. The implication here is that men of lower academic standing do not fully deserve or will not greatly benefit from tutorial conferences. Yet it very frequently happens that a man of vigorous and original mind is unable to adapt himself to the method of education by canned-lectures and hour quizzes. It is for just such a man that the tutorial system of face-to-face discussion may constitute genuine education.

The second point concerns the statement by an unnamed professor that "Research is...the essential raison d'etre for a University." I would not for a moment contend that research is not one function of a University. Yet in this era, marked by worldwide suffering and dislocation among all classes and conditions of men, there is certainly a teaching function which is far more important than research.

The world needs as never before the leadership of humane, educated men, and that leadership must come from the generation of men now passing through the University. The University is the repository of the records of all that is best in Man, and the faculty are men through whom the wisdom of those records should be communicated to other men. Can professors have any greater duty than to teach? I think not. Nere fiddled while Rome burned. Let it not be said of Harvard professors that they did likewise. Sincerely,   Gabriel Jackson '42.