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The Wolff Report: Even Graduate Students Feel Neglected and Lonely

One of our students declared himself unable to think of Harvard as a community of scholars and students. "It is a hierarchy," he said, "and this is the source of our graduate student problems. I feel that we are on the low end of the totem pole."

(The following are excerpts from Part IV of the report of the Wolff Committee, a group of five professors appointed by Dean Ford to study the problems of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Part IV--about one-fifth of the 71 page report--is concerned with the morale of graduate students.)

SOMEWHAT to our surprise, we began to realize early in our deliberations that the gravest current problem in the Graduate School is the one summarized by the well-worn but convenient word "morale." A distressingly large number of graduate students find their experience at Harvard disappointing. They have little sense of belonging to a fellowship, and they keenly miss the enrichments and gratifications that consociation might offer. Their range of relationships with each other is, they believe, much too limited. But it also troubles them that their relationships to the faculty, their department, and the University are tenuous, ambiguous, and generally unsatisfactory. They had hoped that graduate student life would involve stimulating interchange, not only within the areas of their specialties but extending to other intellectual realms that interest them. They find little of the former and less of the latter.

They had hoped to be regarded by the faculty as members of a scholarly company to which the faculty members themselves belong. They find--or believe they find--that they are regarded as subordinates and outsiders to be processed, graded, labeled, and sent forth. They had hoped that they would have as a group a place and a share in the departmental and University communities. They feel that the graduate student body is a fifth wheel seldom remembered when plans are considered and priorities are established.

The themes of belittlement, isolation, and neglect ran contrapuntally through the chorus of complaint. Enering the Graduate School as an elite selected from long lists of applicants, the students seemed to feel that the actual reception meant that nobody really cared for them or their opinions. It is as if they had wandered into a society of competitive, specialized scholars who might perhaps train them to run the academic race but who refused to meet them on the ground of what is meaningful and relevant in their own lives.

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NO DOUBT some of these grievances are unwarranted or half-imaginary; others are real but beyond the reach of either faculty or department control. The transition from college to graduate school implies a certain increase in self-reliance, which is after all a cardinal scholarly virtue. Independent work is likely to be lonely work, but scholars must learn to enjoy the independence and put up with some loneliness. The transition from the happy variety of undergraduate life to professional specialization is likely to seem drab and stultifying in the early stages.

Indeed some of the students we talked with objected to professionalism itself as a goal for graduate study though it was by no means clear what goal that thought would be preferable. For our part we see no acceptable alternative to it, nor are we disposed to seek one. It is popular nowadays to assail academic professionalism for its "sterility," "narowness," or "irrelevance." All would agree that a sterile, narrow, person without a proper sense of relevance is a defective human being, but a far worse one is a soi-disant scholar who does not know his business. We think that the primary concern of the Graduate School must be to create authentic professional scholars who do know their business.

As for some of the other complaints, one can understand and even sympathize, yet remain unable to meet them. Some measure of authority and hierarchy are inherent in the academic world -- or in any world for that matter. If individual faculty members are overly remote or authoritarian, we can piously urge them to to mend their ways, but there is no way of commanding them to do so. . . .

THE EVIDENCE seems to us impressive that the present generation of students is less willing than its predecessors to accept graduate education as we have become accustomed to conducting it. The change is easier to understand if one bears in mind that students of the present generation are in certain important respects different from those of earlier periods. They are older, not in years, but in maturity, experience of life, and conception of themselves.

They are of the generation whose parents, influenced by changing ideas about child rearing, made much of giving affection and declaring esteem while encouraging early independence. They are of the generation whose teachers, responding to changing ideas about education, strenuously taught them to ask questions and think for themselves while giving them increased freedom in running their own affairs. They were reared in a period when social adjustment had come to be considered a prime virtue, with consequent hastening of children into contact with other children and the early formation of a strong "youth culture." . . .

Often our graduate students arrive already married, looking not for the traditional room in a dormitory but for a home for their families. Having emerged in so many ways into fully developed adult status, they are understandably quick to feel demeaned by anything that puts them back into more juvenile roles.

These conditions of upbringing have also accustomed them to expect to be the objects of strong personal interest on the part of their elders. More intensely than ever before, their generation has been influenced by ideals which included giving children attention, taking them seriously, treating them with respect, and making them feel that they are important as individuals. A high value has come to be placed on human--relations variously described as open, honest, uninhibited, and authentic (i.e., "real"), signifying a highly personal style of communication and a downgrading of everything that is formal and conventional. A common symptom of this value is the almost universal use of first names even when there are wide gaps of age and status.

Students today who have been influenced by these widespread tendencies expect to have a strong personal interest taken in them, want authentic communication, and in return are prepared to be themselves authentic and communicative. Apparently these expectations are often not met in their relations with professors. As one of the students put it, "What we need is one-to-one communication." In default of this, they quickly feel that they are unaccountably not accepted.

Today's students are also of the generation nurtured to a deep distrust of authority. . . . For many people brought up in this atmosphere any exercise of power, even that of a doctor over a patient or a teacher over a pupil, creates a feeling of discomfort. To those who are strongly sensitized to this issue the hierarchy structure of a university faculty is an object at once of suspicion and resentment. One of our students declared himself unable to think of Harvard as a community of scholars and students. "It is a hierarchy," he said, "and this is the source of our graduate student problems. I feel that we are on the low end of the totem pole." He saw as a regrettable symbol of this hierarchy the fact that all members of this committee were senior professors. For many, the mere fact of hierarchy was annoying. In addition, it was seen as interfering with the open relations and personal interest that were so much desired.

ALMOST unanimously the graduate students described their situation as "demeaning," and singled out examinations and grades as especially demeaning. . . . Giving grades, the students felt, allowed the teacher to avoid serious engagement with the student's ideas, excused him from making extended qualitative comments on the work done, and thus expressed his unwillingness to bother about the student as a person. As one student expressed it, "What we want is criticism, not grades. Talk to us."

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