Last Monday the University officially released an impressive 133-page self-criticism called the "Report on Advising in Harvard College." Mixed-up world conditions may prevent the University from enacting any of the recommendations made in the study but if conditions don't do this, the report will very likely have the most significant effect on Harvard education of any analysis since that of the Committee on General Education in 1941.

Exactly what the concrete results of the two year study will be, it is impossible to tell now. Nearly every proposal made in the report will be objectionable to some University policy maker or another. But the value and importance of the Advising Report, lies not in the specific proposals it makes, but in the issues it deals with, the problems it is trying to solve. Nearly everyone at Harvard likes the goals of the report, though some may disagree with the means proposed in it.

The "Advising" report is really concerned with much more than its name implies. "Advising" is defined so broadly that it comes to mean virtually all faculty student contacts, not merely those in which students are specifically helped in the solving of their problems. The report actually deals with the relations of the students in Harvard College to their teachers.

This relationship is what the administration was worried about when it called for the report. The post war College was providing a different education than it did in the 1930's, and there were many observers who thought that the modern brand of education wasn't any better than the traditions which it supplanted.

Increase in the number of students without corresponding increases in the size of the faculty, the curtailment of tutorial instruction, and the scowling of the Houses all helped cause a broad, new tendency towards mass education. Nor was this helped by the increased use of young, inexperienced Teaching Fellows rather than permanent faculty men as undergraduate advisors.

Also, taking a long-range view, the student body at the College now has become more heterogeneous in nature and origin than it was 50 years ago. The 1100 students in each incoming class now come from diverse educational, geographic, social, economic, religious, and racial backgrounds. Their varied standards of value are more likely to clash, and their college-time troubles are more numerous than in the days of President Eliot. Clearly an advising problem is created here, as well as by the factors mentioned above.

What Should Advising Do?

Before launching into an investigation of the present-day advising system with the purpose of bettering it, the faculty committee that made the report set down a number of basic principles to guide its discussion.

The most notable of these general propositions are that advising is an essential part of a good College education, and that this advising should not be concerned merely with academic problems, but with all sides of the student's personality. However, "advising, in a college which emphasizes independence, maturity, and self-education, will not be paternalistic." Students will be made to make their own decisions. Advisers will only listen and provide information.

Another basic decision is that guidance experts, or professional counselors, will not be used. Ordinary advising must be based on "an organized intellectual relationship between teacher and student," for in that relationship most of the value of advising appears. But specialists will be used for certain important aspects of advising, such as reading and psychiatric problems.

Once the principles are laid down, the investigation and evaluation begin.

The main cause of the trouble in the College's entire advising system is that it has grown in spurts through the years, in a totally unplanned fashion, the report says. Not until now has there been any attempt to plan the system as a whole--in relation to the educational purposes of the College. When the College reached the size where Freshmen were not well watched by their instructors, the Board of Freshman Advisers was set up. When the commercial tutoring schools threatened the basis of fair grade competition in the College, they were drive out and the Bureau of Study Counsel was inaugurated. Later the psychiatry portion of the Hygiene department was established.

The New Advising Plan

The educational program followed a similar evolutionary procedure. Concentration and distribution requirements arrived, General Education, Tutorial, and the whole lot. Each new development had its effect on the formal and informal relations of students and teachers, or advisers. The result was a large, active advising system, but one that was not so efficient as it might have been and the exact purpose of which remained ill defined.

To consider each section of the advising program in turn: