Many Harvard undergraduates today are not well enough acquainted with even one faculty member to ask for a character reference. Professors and students alike have noticed this during the past few years, and felt it was a sign that something is going seriously wrong with the Harvard education. Last fall faculty committee took action. Under the chairmanship of Dean Bender, this group turned out the 133-page "Report on Advising in Harvard College" (the so-called Bender Report). About a month ago, the whole faculty unanimously upheld the underlying principle of the report--that some kind of tutorial system was necessary for the five largest departments to bring closer faculty-student contact. Many months of discussion will be needed to iron out the details of such a plan. The undergraduate will probaboy not notice any significant change in his study program until the fhall of 1952.

The total lack of acquaintance between faculty and undergraduate is a relatively new development. Only since World War II, after the University adopted the 1945 General Education Committee recommendation limiting tutorial to honors candidates, has this estrangement really developed. Before then, it was different.

During the austere early days of the College, undergraduates had a tutor. Tutor-student relations were close, although occasionally uncomfortable. The tutors were also responsible for discipline.

"New England's First Fruits in Respect to the Colledge and the proceedings of learning therin" (1642) has this to say:

". . . And if anything they (students) doubt, they fhall enquire . . . modeftly of their Tutors.

Avoid 'Diffolute Life'

6. None fhall under any pretence whatfoever, frequent the company and fociety of fuch men as lead an unfit and diffolute life.

Nor fhall, without his Tutors leave, (or, in his abfence) the call of Parents or Guardians, goe abroad to other Townes.

7. Every Scholar fhall be prefent in his Tutors chamber at the 7th. houre in the morning, immediately after the found of the Bell at his opening the Scripture and prayer, fo alfo at the 5th. houre at night, and then give account of his owne private reading. . . ."

Tutors were also required to be present in the Dining Hall "a meal times, to prevent disorders."

Gradually, the trend of Harvard education bore away from the rigidly defined classical preparation for he ministry. Electives, introduced over a century ago, reached their heyday 50 years later when a degree could be had merely by passing 18 courses, no two of which needed to be related.

'Low Born Rustics'

With this trend, came the estrangement of tutors. During the first days of the University, the feeling between undergraduate and tutor was generally friendly and intimate. Samuel Eliot Morison '03 in "Three Conturies of Harvard" comments on the change:

"But in the eighteenth cenutry, tutors had their own chambers, and during the disorderly period of the Revolution, if not before, the undergraduates began to look upon them as their natural enemies. A lad who treated his tutor as a friend was looked down upon as a 'fisherman', and the tutors regarded the undergraduates as inmates in a reformatory . . ."

One student of the period stated that tutors were "invariably low born despicable rustics, lately emerged from the dunghill, who, conscious of their own want of genius, were determined to discountenance all who possessed it."