WELL, I went to see my adviser, who helped me select my studies for the yea. That is, he hypnotized me into thinking a lot of things I really don't see why I should know. However, as I don't seem to have what he called a 'startling predilection' for anything (my entrance exams divulged this), and as he is a pleasant young man who invited me to dinner next week, I allowed myself to be influenced by him."

Over fifty years after Charles M. Flaundrau wrote his Diary of a Freshman, criticism of the advising system in the freshman year is still just as strong, and just as misleading. Student Councils have recommended changes, Deans have taken second and third looks at the system, improvements have come, but the student continues to protest with those amused and amusing questions: "My adviser? Why, all I ever got from him as hi signature on my study card, and that was in the wrong place."

An Important Introduction

Even if many freshmen answer questions about their advisers with a guffaw, few students or faculty members can deny that the freshman adviser is an extremely important introduction to Harvard. As a newcomer's first official personal contact with the University, he is able-for good or for bad-to affect a freshman's attitude toward the faculty, toward Harvard, and toward education. And yet, although an adviser can become something more than a distant man in a busy office, it is equally hard to deny that a student may, and indeed often does, ignore his adviser and his adviser's advice.

Many of the basic problems of the freshman year are bound up in this take-it-or-leave it advising system, and in a sense, the problems of the Advising system are the problems of the freshman year. For basic to both is the unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable question: How much should Harvard attempt to ease the jolt of freshman year? Or, put another way, to what extent is a jolt the necessary prelude to a Harvard education?

The answers to these questions today would probably number as many as the 104 members of the Board of Freshman Advisers. Even though each of these men-from first year law students to full professors, from deans to masters in the Houses, from residents in the Yard to inhabitants of Belmont--would have his own notion of what an adviser should, or should not, do, the basic purpose of advising remains what President Eliot in 1889 first established a committee of 14 freshman advisers.

"It was expected," Eliot wrote, "that if a profitable and pleasant relation were established during the freshman year between the adviser and the advised, the relation would be maintained during the later College year; but the primary function of the adviser was no give counsel and encouragement to the newcomer, bewildered perhaps by the sudden freedom of College life, the multiplicity of fresh interests, and the complexity of his first problem--the wise selection of studies."

First Hand Acquaintance

Although the program has undergone many changes over the years, and has grown from 14 to 104 members, the aims are substantially the same: "to give the student an acquaintance, at first hand, and out of the classroom, with the virtues and defects of the teaching staff," as Dean Leighton puts it.

Beyond this, however, Dean Leighton will not go. with a long involvement with the advising system--he was dean of freshmen in 1931-32 when seniors moved out of the Yard and freshmen moved in-Leighton is "skeptical of all formulations of what an adviser should do, for no one is really qualified to advise freshmen."

"Ideally," he adds, "the adviser should have technical knowledge of the student's field; he should have foresight enough to predict the number of applicants to graduate schools in five years; he should be familiar with all the courses in the university; and he should know and understand his advisee's personality almost immediately. This person just doesn't exist."

If the ideal adviser does not exist--and it is a pretty safe bet that he doesn't--what do the present advisers actually do? How much time do they spend with their advisees, and what kind of advice" do they give?

The most limited form of advising is, of course, the adviser who sits in his office, sees his students for ten minutes, and does little but perfunctorily answer a question or two. Last year's Student Council Report on "The Freshman Year at Harvard College" indicates that about 10 percent of the students polled felt that this type of study-card relationship existed with their adviser.

Advisers, of course, are limited by time, but most find the time and interest to go well beyond this narrow study-card approach. Harold C. Martin, director of General Education Ahf, for instance, sees an an important function for advisers the help they can give to students to get through the "machinery and red-tape of Harvard." "All the advising system is, in the end," says Martin, "is a substitute for the kind of explanation one would give to a stranger or a guest if he came to one's house."

Martin feels that the relationship between adviser and advisee should be "based on an intellectual rapproachment, without any conscious striving toward a personal one." He is, in fact, highly critical of anything smacking of the paternal--although a role as a friendly uncle is at times appropriate. "A student has no right to expect his adviser to be a Father-Confessor," he says; "if he happens to find one, that is fine, as long as the adviser isn't too ready with advice. The adviser can be an amiable listener, but the student has no reason to expect him to be a sounding board."