At the second general meeting on Feb. 15, 150 teaching fellows gathered in Burr to endorse overwhelmingly the committee's recommendation that the organization address itself initially to the wages and work load problem. The subcommittee had ingeniously proposed that a petition be used to present the salary request to the University. Once approved, by the organization, the petition would be signed by as many TF's as possible, giving the leadership a fairly legitimate claim to representing the teaching fellows in salary talks without actually being their bargaining agent. The meeting approved the subcommittee's petition as a "guideline" for talks, and requested a figure of $1600 per fifth as a minimum salary for teaching fellows, $400 more than the top rate a TF presently receives. As for the fifth itself, the complex measuring unit by which the University calculates how much work a teaching fellow is doing, all the assembly could decide was set up another committee to study the question. The meeting also gave the organization a name--the Federation of Teaching Fellows--and a temporary executive troika.

The other issues originally involved in the TF's discontent--a role in the formulation of academic policy and a voice on other issues--have been set aside but not forgotten. The concept of teaching fellows' helping to set course methods and content or speaking out on general issues like the draft has a higher alienation potential than the relatively safe demand for more money to live on. The Feb. 15 meeting voted that the Federation should deal with issues of undergraduate education, but for the moment, the Federation will probably play it safe until it has had a chance to set its foundations firmly with bread and butter issues.

There are still two distinct, unresolved conceptions of what the Federation should be and how it should operate. One group sees it as a consultative body, a forum through which teaching fellows could communicate with each other and with the Faculty and administration. The other group sees the Federation as a pressure group that would actively push for material benefits for teaching fellows. The two conceptions are by no means mutually exclusive, but they would eventually prove devisive.

Meaty Percentage

At the moment, the Federation is not yet over the hump. Several serious problems remain for it to deal with. The first is simply to drum up interest among the other TF's. Though its general meetings have been well-attended, the Federation has only reached a fraction of the teaching fellows in the University, and, as one organizer said, "Nobody's going to listen to any proposition we make until we have a good meaty percentage of teaching fellows behind us."

There is also the question of how much power the Federation will have to represent before the University will heed its demands. This is not a problem of numbers so much as it is a problem of militancy. With the organization in its present loose form, the University may not be required to take its requests seriously. If the administration chose to politely ignore the Federation, the leadership would have to confront the tough question: what do we have to do to make them listen to us?

But the organization still faces a basic concern in not alienating too many other teaching fellows, undergraduates or faculty. The TF's are in considerable part planning on academic careers, and their futures may depend on a favorable recommendation from a Faculty member. And, as aspiring professors themselves, they may already share a faculty viewpoint without actually being part of the faculty.

Life of its Own

Another difficulty is continuity. Since most teaching fellows stay at Harvard for only three or four years, the organization will have to develop a life of its own that will sustain it when the present set of leaders is gone.

But the ultimate problem seems to be Harvard's decentralization. There is very little but wages and hours that can unite a teaching fellow in Geology with one in Music on some common course of action. Perhaps the solution will be truly federative--an interdepartmental organization linking strong departmental groups. But at the moment it is impossible to predict what form the Federation will finally assume.

The future of the Federation is sure to become clearer in the weeks ahead, however, as it moves toward its first official contact with the University. Most of the Feb. 15 meeting took place under two words which were scrawled on the Burr A blackboard during the first minutes of discussion: "Fairness" and "Effectiveness." If the Federation can resolve the two to the satisfaction of most of Harvard's teaching fellows, the unhappy TF's may at last have found the voice they want