"Who really thinks about the Houses?" a student casually asked a high University official at an unofficial moment.

"Oh, I think everyone thinks about the Houses," was the off-the-cuff reply.

"Yes, but who thinks constructively about what the Houses should be?"

"Well, the Masters are concerned with parietal rules and the Committee on..."

"But does any powerful group which can get results work on the big problems?"

"No, none that I can think of," the administrator frankly answered.

His answer could not have been affirmative, for despite an occasional general report and frequent debate over trivia, very few constructive ideas have affected the Houses since President Lowell built them a quarter century ago. After initial student and alumni opposition to the then radical plan had subsided, the Houses gradually became subjects of complacent self-congratulation and reminders of an era when Harvard was smaller in size, but perhaps greater in strength.

Whether or not the Houses were once more vital centers because of fewer residents and a higher proportion of tutors, is a question on which honest men differ. Certainly the Houses offer some benefits today which were absent in the 1930's. But the critical point is that the Houses are not now what President Lowell intended them to be: "the way the benefits of the small college are combined with the rich offerings of a great university."

Today a behemoth University negates the real potential of Harvard's seven Houses, and unless well-planned efforts are made, the situation will grow worse as the University grows larger. It remains to be seen whether President Pusey's Administration will choose, or be able, to make those efforts.

A favorite maxim of University administrators is that the College derives its greatest strength first from its faculty, and second from its facilities. For the undergraduate, no "facilities" are potentially more important than the Houses, and yet for many they are little more than crowded dormitories with second-rate, although inexpensive, dining rooms.

It is evident that many undergraduates consider the House just another place to sleep. House activities suffer in comparison with college-wide associations; House athletics are dwarfed by varsity sports; and the House as a social community is drained by half a thousand students who seek social identification with various clubs. But most important, the House as an imaginative arrangement for bringing faculty and student together is very little arrangement at all. While the lucky student may make intellectually valuable contacts within the informal atmosphere of the House, for the great majority, contact with tutors comes about as close as the distance between a lecturer and his audience. According to the recent survey of undergraduate opinion, the two top complaints voiced by students are "lack of close contact with the faculty" and "impersonality of atmosphere."

Just as with the College as a whole, the strength of the House depends primarily on the strength of its staff, and the ratio of tutors to students. The New York Times Magazine succinctly expressed the idea in 1930: "The success of the House plan eventually depends on the tutor who furnishes the manpower of the educational plant, of which the House is a mere shell." At present, while the House possess potentially strong staffs, their manpower in relation to the number of students in each House is negligible. As the number has increased, the proportion of tutors has decreased, while the Houses, hence the College, have suffered.

Although it would be unrealistic to dwell on the tutorial system as it existed in the College of the mid-30's, nothing is a more nostalgic form of conversation. Invariably, Masters refer to the few years when virtually every student had an individual tutor, often a full professor or junior faculty member. But the system had grave difficulties and perhaps insoluble inner-conflicts, which exploded full-force in the face of President Conant.

When President Lowell retired in 1933, the number of tutors who had no chance of academic advancement had become groundswell. The individual tutorial program for everyone, moreover, was a serious drain on both the budget and the tutors' time. In 1936, tutorial became an optional activity for a department, with tutorial for all sophomores and for only those juniors and seniors of exceptional ability. By 1938, faculty discontent forced President Conant to appoint the "Committee of Eight" to investigate "some problems of personnel in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences." For the purpose of the individual tutorial system, the Committee's recommendations for a rigid system of academic advancement meant that there would be fewer tutors, and, in that sense, the grand beginnings of tutorial were destroyed. The Committee, nevertheless, did perform the necessary function of reducing the base of the academic pyramid, which had swollen out of all proportion to the number of permanent appointments at the apex.

The Second War further impaired the tutorial system, and in the post-war years undergraduate dissatisfaction grew as the plan became more impotent. Then the "Bender Report" resulted in a decentralized Dean's Office (the Allston Burr Senior Tutors) and the concept of group tutorial. As an alternative to the expensive system of individual tutorial, group sessions were perhaps the best solution which could be expected. Certainly they are better than no tutorial at all.