Non-Honors Leaders

President Pusey has recently asserted that the job of the college teacher is "to awaken in the learner the resistless drive for answers and insights which enlarge the personal life and give it meaning." It is difficult to do this in a lecture course; the Faculty has wisely realized that the best opportunity for awakening such a drive is in the close, personal contact between student and tutor found in a tutorial session, where the student is forced to think perceptively. But the Faculty has been curiously lax in extending the opportunity for such thinking to the non-Honors student, the one who is perhaps in greatest need of the awakening of what the President calls a "resistless drive." Frequently it is the non-Honors student who attempts stimulation in activities rather than academics, and when he sees that the Faculty's concern for his academically inclined fellow does not noticeably extend to him, his feeling of alienation increases, along with the chances for action independent of student and Faculty codes.

But something is forgotten. Last year, after a few of the most highly-regarded students in the senior class had engaged in some minor vandalism and street fighting, they were angrily called to the office of a professor and given a thorough tongue lashing. The substance of his anger was these promising senior scholars had not yet realized that to be a scholar implies a strong degree of moral conscience, than the life of the mind demands a commitment to responsible moral action. It is this statement, so important for an academic community to understand and accept, that has perhaps been lost amid administrative desires to avoid paternalism and bad publicity.

Commitment to Community

But the problems inherent in a community whose inhabitants deny the possibility of being represented cannot be solved by citing a moral maxim. Rather one might ask for an increased awareness of the problem, on the part of everyone at Harvard, and the awareness of his relationship to the Harvard community. The student is not just an independent thinker, cut off from all about him; by choosing to study at Harvard rather than with a private tutor at home, he commits himself to participation in the College community. This includes the commitment to provide for as adequate representation of students to the administration as possible, so that steps may be taken to improve the college and the curriculum with the student in mind. It includes the commitment of those who choose to be student-leaders to remain faithful to the wishes of those who elect them, to place their leader selves in subordination to their student selves, thus to immerse themselves more thoroughly in the purposes and moral standards of an academic community. It includes further a commitment on the part of the Faculty toward the scholastic and moral education of the individual undergraduate, not by paternalistically limiting his independence, but simply by taking a greater interest in him.

With an effort on the part of all to bring a greater degree of mutual understanding to this community, a greater value on "official or personal standards" can be set, providing a more indicative and more responsible system of representation. The condition which Henry Adams lamented has existed at Harvard College for too long