There are a number of reasons for the junior faculty's impotence in determining Departmental policy. "What is bugging people is inevitable in the structure of the University," one junior faculty member commented. "That is, that you have great men with incredible power over masses of graduate students and their careers." A tutor who aspires to a post at another college after receiving his degree must depend heavily on the recommendation of senior faculty members at Harvard.

And because very few of the junior faculty members ever wind up with good positions on the Harvard faculty, there is a rapid turnover of ambitious young men that quickly erodes any attempt at a sustained reform movement. "At Harvard you don't go that far that fast, and you don't get the feeling that it's your department," said one History tutor. "You're going to leave--not get fired, you're going to want to leave."

The eight tutors who proposed the reforms last Spring are a case in point. Two are now at other colleges, one is in Europe, and one is at the School of Education. "The leadership's sort of gone," a member of the group observed.

The knowledge that junior faculty stays at Harvard are likely to be short breeds a grudging sympathy with the senior men's position, even among the reformers themselves. "Hell," one said, "the senior people are the ones who have to live with the system after we leave."

Underlying the disproportionate power of the two groups involved in the discussion was a real lack of communication. Neither side seemed to completely understand what motivated the other to action.

The tutors apparently underestimated the strength of the senior faculty's commitment to the thesis as an educational instrument. "The senior faculty feels very strongly that the thesis is the backbone of the entire program," said one tutor. The thesis is invaluable as "a pedagogical tool," said Gordon S. Wood, the Department's assistant senior tutor, which "gives the student the best understanding of the nature of history that he will get in four years here." The senior seminar would have bypassed the thesis, and there were also financial difficulties in setting up a large seminar program.

Also, Handlin said, the sentiment of the Department has always been against any limitation on the number of people writing theses. The presumption, he said, has been that anyone who is good enough to get into Harvard is good enough to do a thesis.

But the senior faculty treated the tutors' proposals as something selfishly of the tutors, for the tutors and by the tutors. They neglected the "teacherly" motivations for reforms such as the senior seminar. Fleming spoke of the tutors' trying to "unload" thesis writers into the seminars, and Handlin asserted that, all things being equal, no undergraduate would opt for the senior seminars, and some people might have to be forced into the program.

Handlin apparently drew his conclusions about undergraduate sentiment from a series of meetings with History concentrators held last May at the suggestion of the Harvard Policy Committee. But the undergraduates were chosen by the Department and not by the HPC, and their mandate, if any, was not clear.

"Some people thought he used the meeting to say the students favored his point of view against the teaching fellows," said an HPC member. "Handlin interpreted the meeting one way and others interpreted it another way."

In any case, the impetus for change in the History Department is largely gone, at least among the junior faculty. Discontent no longer seems to be focused as it was in the Spring, though there is still talk of instituting senior seminars in some supplementary, non-honors role.

Perhaps the junior faculty's weakness in affecting Department policy is structural. As one assistant professor said, "No matter how warm, humane and lovable the people in power are, the junior people are going to feel persecuted in some way."

But the fate of the last reform movement has done little to sooth the junior faculty's feelings. "We just wanted to take part," said one of the original eight. The tutors, he said, hoped for the assurance of "a voice--or at least that you'd be listened to. You want to be given a sense of responsibility, and this is what the History Department has failed to give to its junior faculty."