American colleges are distinguished by, among other things, a variety of purposes. Harvard College has committed itself by tradition and by frequent statement to the particular ideal of the "liberal education" as its field of activity. Speeches, articles, and books by the faculty and administrative officers of the University have reiterated that Harvard intends to produce neither technicians nor carefully stamped wax educational dummies, but intelligent, useful citizens--men, in other words, who have the broad background and mental vigor to be able to understand and evaluate the issues facing the Free Society in the twentieth century.

How well the College has succeeded in this complex aim may best be measured by an evaluation of the individuals within it, an attempt to find out what Harvard has done for them and to them in the four long and significant years of their lives they have spent in Cambridge.

Admissions Policy

Just what individuals make up the student body is the first matter of import. The Harvard degree may be meaningful to an applicant in social, intellectual, or commercial ways. The Committee on Admissions has solved its problem of choice by compromise. While emphasizing the "democratization" of the College, the committee continues to admit a large body of men from a small number of private schools. These men, as has been pointed out, make generous alumni, and they therefore perform a valuable function while Harvard remains a privately endowed institution. Nonetheless the Admissions Committee should continue to work toward the most efficient and fairest intellectual entrance tests, screening out men whose ability to make use of the College is doubtful.

Once in Cambridge the individual faces his most difficult year as he starts. The student is at his most impressionable as a freshman, and the difficulties he faces are many. The usefulness of the freshman adviser in the situation varies with the widely different abilities of the advisory staff. Further pressure on the student from University Hall, however, while possibly a solution to some of the academic errors of the freshman year-particularly over-specialization--, would bring too many attendant injuries to undergraduate freedom with it to be recommended.

General Education

General Education courses offer a partial solution to the academic problems of the freshman. By remaining non-compulsory they stand on their merits--and they have succeeded on those merits. Strong University backing for the program has resulted in valuable experimentation on methods in the courses, as well as the gathering of an outstanding staff. The G.E. program is particularly valuable in the new general courses it can offer the freshman or non-concentrator, courses which have demonstrated the ability to stimulate interest in, for example, the principles of science, while old elementary science--or economies or government or history--courses frighten many a man from the field.

Instruction remains the significant problem area in this as in other colleges. The lecture system, first target of many reformers, has many desirable elements for a large institution. It is, however, no panacea. Its excuse is the means of allowing a "great" man to speak to large numbers of people, and when a lecturer is mediocre or worse the system is less than worthwhile. Lectures should, therefore, be considered not as the only educational method at Harvard, but rather as one of many systems or combinations of systems available to departments or faculty men planning their courses.

The lecture system is particularly weak when unaccompanied by other elements designed to unify the individual's education and to bring him into closer contact with the faculty. Further experiments with small section groups might lead to a partial fulfillment of this requirement, but the key to the problem, which is perhaps the most dangerous within the educational picture of Harvard today, still lies in tutorial.

What is needed on the question of tutorial is, first, less argument and more cooperation and compromise, and, second, more thought about the problem at the center of the University and less option for the individual departments. Tutorial is dying--in fact, is as close to dead as is imaginable--because it became financially impractical in its original form. In the financial rush to get away from it, compromise has been almost negligible, and it is this compromise which might save the elements of tutorial which make it still the only sound way to unify education in a lecture system college.

Group tutorial may be the answer for a great many departments, and some of them have already experimented in this departure. Individual assistance for junior and senior honors candidates is essential in other places. What should not be allowed to happen is the insidiously silent junking of all but a ghost of the system that has occurred, for example, in the Economics Department. Only action by the administration or the faculty as a whole can save the best aspects of tutorial and rebuild them into an integrated system. It is such action that is called for.

New Instruction Methods

At the same time the College must be awake to the possibilities of new methods of instruction. Some courses, especially in General Education, have already experimented with the use of papers instead of examinations, and more can be done in this area. In any case, examinations should be brought nearer to the ideal of educational usefulness by more careful marking and return of the papers to the students.

The College has a social as well as academic responsibility to its students. In the freshman year this means working through the Union, seeking to extend its facilities for the class. Afterwards it means trying to make the Houses something more than the dining halls and dormitories that, with one or two exceptions, they are now. This implies the use of every possible academic or social device to restore the Houses to their original central purpose. Throughout the individual's four years it means the College's responsibility not to re-emphasize the family and social backgrounds of individuals by its placement of them in dormitories or Houses.

When the individual has completed his four years in Cambridge, he has come out, if he is lucky, with what Henry Adams called the negative values of a Harvard education. That is to say, his mind is free. He has profited from what remains the most striking factor in the College: its individualism. Individualism, however, has the unpleasant effect in many cases of waste. It is this waste of the resources Harvard can offer that has made many educators here think in terms of more advice and control from the dean's office, prescribed courses, and similar remedies.

The Attack on Waste

If individualism is to be saved, the attack on waste must be made from the opposite standpoint. The student must be made to want to use what Harvard offers, to know and dislike the waste before he graduates--the time when many men do finally understand and oppose it. The attack on waste must embrace a new willingness to change the archaie and the inadequate, and it must incorporate a new spirit of central responsibility for the methods and character of Harvard education.

The most important factor is the concern of all the faculty and administration. That concern could be shown at once by the appointment of a body to investigate the education offered the individual at Harvard. $60,000 spent by a Committee on the relation of Harvard and the student would certainly produce results as interesting and as significant as those of the General Education Committee. Such a group would at all events help to create a thesis or an ideal at which the College could aim. It might also, in the long run, create a more positive education than that which Henry Adams so clearly described, an education which would leave the mind of the student free, and make it alive as well.