The College Scene series was initiated as an attempt to examine and to evaluate the academic and social environment of the individual in Harvard College. Previous editorials have undertaken only the preliminary examination. They have not been concerned with diagnosis or remedies. From these editorials conclusions are now to be drawn; these conclusions, in turn, will form the basis for recommendations. In order to make clear the context within which both conclusions and recommendations are to be understood, "Looking Backward" will summarize the content of the previous editorials.

The material of the College Scene is heterogeneous and scattered. If anything were to unify the ramblings of the series--from the College's admissions policies to instruction techniques, from concentration and distribution requirements to the House System--it would be the individual student, on whom the effect of each of these various aspects of the Harvard environment was examined.

There is, of course, no "individual" who can be taken as the archetype of Harvard undergraduates. The student body is characterized rather by a singular lack of any clearly defined mutual characteristics. Nowhere along the line from admissions to Commencement is there a unifying impulse. This absence, better known as the College's policy of fostering "individualism," sends students out into four years of college on a certificate of admission and a prayer. Many channel this independence into a successful and rich education; others become lost in its uncharted maze of courses and activities.

No Class Integration

Harvard's disunited, splintered student body exists in embryo within each Freshman class as it files through Memorial Hall. On the one hand are the variegated products of a "democratized" admissions policy that has abandoned specialized entrance examinations and emphasized National Scholarships and geographical distribution. On the other is the half of each Freshman class that still comes from private schools, about 60 percent of this half ordinarily being graduates of Groton, St. Paul's, Middlesex, Milton, and others of the "Grottlesex" schools. This dichotomy is not uniquely Harvard's, although it is uniquely marked at Harvard. It is a split that exists in some degree in many of the nation's colleges, and probably to a significant degree in other eastern universities. But where other colleges manage in four years to weld their gangling, dissimilar Freshmen into something approaching an effective group, Harvard, deliberately or no, sees to it that Seniors in cap and gown care little for the greatest part of their classmates, know nothing of the hopes, aims, and activities of anybody outside their own small circle. Nor are their bachelors degrees necessarily a sign of an education any more integrated than the Class itself.

Early in the Freshman year, nearly all students discover that they are intended to find their own way through four years of college. The indifference of the Freshman adviser is so well known as to have become the butt of popular witticisms. The highly important Freshman year, because of this indifference, is far too often spent in wasted effort--there is nothing to prevent a student from over-specializing or from over-generalizing, or from thinking in terms of an altogether wrong field of concentration.

Direction Lacking

This tendency to throw the student to the academic winds continues throughout his four years, unless he is one of the few still aided by the dying tutorial system, in which case he receives some guidance through the immense number of courses open to him and some help in integrating what he learns. Otherwise, he is left alone with a so-called adviser and the concentration and distribution rules, neither of which are capable of preventing some students from sacrificing themselves to a narrow program and a dogged pursuit of the Cum Laude Cause. Nor can others be prevented from choosing distribution courses in far too haphazard a way to fulfill any of the requisites of a "liberal education."

The General Education program has been envisaged as a solution to this very problem. It is intended to provide students with a "common core of knowledge." Whether or not the program will eventually achieve this end is a moot issue at the moment, one that will be resolved only if and when the program becomes compulsory and is characterized by more of the suggestions made in the original Report. In the meantime, the undiscriminating methods of the lecture-books-examination system will continue in force, leaving undergraduates to their own varied, and in many cases, inadequate devices.

Just as the College, on the academic level, permits students to integrate their life as they will, so on the social level undergraduates are largely thrown clear of any unifying factors. Neither Houses nor classes can claim to create any strong bonds among students. The result of both the academic and social structure in the College is largely the same. The stereotypes already present in an incoming Freshman class become hardened: the scholars become more scholarly; the playboys play more; those who adapt themselves easily join clubs, publications, and other sorts of groups, and those who do not adjust easily become increasingly isolated. "Individualism," it is called, and it is the outstanding characteristic of Harvard College.