Back in the Gold Coast days, when tutoring schools around the Square offered packaged educations and guaranteed Harvard diplomas, College students could spend much of their time in New York or Bermuda and still pick up their "gentleman's C's."

"Diplomas by Harvard--Tutoring by Wolff," proclaimed Wolff's Tutors. The College Tutoring Bureau boasted, "We are now ready to serve you with our Notes, Outlines, and Liberal Translations," and the motto of the University Tutors was "Midnight Oil, Loathsome Toil."

The "tute" schools provided their clientele with ghost-written papers, specially abridged textbooks, and stolen lecture notes and exam questions. By the 1930s, it was estimated that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the undergraduate body patronized these houses of intellectual ill-fame.

"Pay as You Pass"

Today the cram schools are no more. They and their often-successful attempts to beat the academic system have been replaced by the Bureau of Study Counsel, which may not advertise as well but which, from a long view, is unquestionably more valuable to any student. It is the Bureau's function to help men make the sometimes-difficult adjustment to life at Harvard and, at the same time, to enable the University's faculty to do a better job of teaching.

Where the cram schools did a man's work for him, the Bureau, through counseling conferences and private tutoring, helps him to stand on his own feet. In place of abridged textbooks and digested lecture notes, the Bureau runs a semi-annual reading course to encourage faster reading and better study organization.

In addition, says William G. Perry, Jr., '35, Director of the Bureau, "Our seminars with interested faculty members and advisors transmit the kind of educational problem we meet to those people on the teaching end of the learning process."

The Bureau of Study Counsel was organized in 1948 to fill the legitimate need of extra-curricular help for men with academic problems. Oven a period of sixty years an ever-increasing number of students had succumbed to the enticement of the tutoring schools, which, with their "Pay as You Pass" plans, had a business grossing $250,000 annually.

The Square's educational bordelles had been experiencing difficulty, however. Their first major trouble came in 1933, when Macmillan, Houghton Miffin, Harper Brothers, and Ginn and Company brought suit against the College Tutoring Bureau charging that their abridging of text-books constituted a violation of copyright laws. A federal district court awarded the publishers damages and enjoined the College Tutors from continuing such practices.

Traps and Common Law

In 1935 the University had Manter Hall, no longer under the commendable direction of its founder, William ("The Widow") Nolen '87, and the University Tutors legally enjoined from selling lecture notes, the property of the University by common law. A Student Council investigation followed, condemning the activities of the tutoring schools.

Then in 1939, the CRIMSON launched a campaign seeking abolition of the cram pariors and banned their advertising from its columns. Within a month, the University threatened to expel any student who sold his lecture notes. Professors laid traps in their exams for students who used canned answers provided by tute schools. Finally, in 1940, all outside tutoring was banned.

Bureaucracy of Specialists

Meanwhile, to aid those students who needed legitimate help, the College had already established the Bureau of Supervisors in 1938. Graduate students, proctors, and upperclassmen served as "supervisors" in their fields. Directed by Stanley Salmen, who had led the CRIMSON's campaign against tutoring schools as an undergraduate, the new Bureau tried to enable the student to free himself from the need for extra help. In 1948 the supervisors were incorporated into the approximately eighty-man staff of the Bureau of Study Counsel.

Those with Four A's