This is the first of a two-part series examining education within the House system. Tomorrow's feature will deal with the realationship of freshman to the Houses.

HARVARD HOUSES, our college catalogues tell us, aim to combine the intimacy of small college living with the programs and resources of a large university. Yet continuing dissatisfaction with various aspects of the House system suggests a prevailing uncertainty as to how such a goal is to be realized and, more fundamentally, as to the values by which means to the goal may be selected.

Ambiguities in philosophy, insofar as a unified philosophy of the House system exists at all, manifest themselves at each planning crisis--whether consideration is being given to new programs and experiments or administrators are planning to change the levels of House programs' subsidies. Rarely can projects be definitively assessed, since no one is certain by what yardstick the success of an activity in the Houses is to be measured.

Several major issues over the past few years should have enabled the Harvard community to focus on the question: What should the Houses be doing? Though coresidential living should have been such an issue, the lack of commitment to a truly new attitude on women or on life in the Houses is evidenced by the continuing shortage of women tutors and faculty and the fact that there are no women Senior Tutors or women expressly chosen as Masters for Harvard Houses.

Two issues this spring--education in the Houses and the Houses' affiliation with freshmen--will again afford the opportunity to stop and ask toward what ends the Houses should aim. On the basis of past administrative actions, there is reason to doubt that this question will be answered meaningfully, despite the earnest, even redundant, investigative efforts of the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life (CHUL) and the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE).

A look at past attempts to deal with these issues reveals, primarily, the conflict of budgetary priorities and policy decisions with those goals for the Houses which have actually been articulated. Furthermore, those involved in making relevant decisions seem uncertain as to what those goals do indeed represent.

I

SINCE 1969, two major studies have been conducted which pertain to the issue of education in the Houses: the November 1969 Report of the Committee on the Role of the Faculty in the Houses (the Homans Report) and the October 1970 Report of the Informal Subcommittee on the Harvard House System presented to CHUL. Though neither report has the official sanction of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, both committees did make extensive recommendations which have not been carried out, either in practice or in spirit.

In particular, cutbacks in spending on the Houses ignore the recommendations of these reports. For example, the Homans Report proposed to give each Master five dollars per undergraduate in his House for the support of student-initiated activities. The Homans Committee recommended the creation of House councils to represent students and staff in advising the Master on House affairs. Except for an early experiment at Eliot House, that proposal has also been ignored.

Lack of concern for the reports' recommendations is most clearly shown in the treatment of tutors. For instance, the Homans Report emphasized the importance of married residential tutors and urged that provision be made for more suites for tutor couples. At the end of 1970, in direct opposition to the spirit of this recommendation, a proposal was introduced to the CHUL advocating that married tutors be charged rent.

The proposal was not acted upon at that time, but was discussed and finally formalized at informal meetings of the Masters in Fall 1970 and February 1971. Dean of Students Archie C. Epps stated in an interview two weeks ago that the proposal represented an "implied criticism of the tutors", with which he did not concur. Nevertheless, only protest by tutors, students, and members of the Faculty stopped the measure. According to Steve Burbank '68, assistant dean of the College, the letters of several tutors were "instrumental" in forestalling the rent proposal.

DURING THE RENT dispute, the administration voiced a number of its arguments for charging the tutors rent. For example, it was alleged that free rooms for married tutors, particularly for tutors with families, granted them a marginal benefit greater than that available to unmarried tutors. Some alleged that tutors' spouses (in Harvard terms, that means "wives") did not take an active part in the Houses. Tutors' meal funds were consequently cutback, with Richard G. Leahy, assistant dean for Resources and Planning, seeing a drop in tutors' meals as a benefit.

"If I were a House Master, I'd like to see a better distribution of which tutors eat in the dining halls now," Leahy said. "The same tutors eat in the Houses all the time, while others never do." It so happens this measure does nothing to bring absentee tutors into the Houses; it only "equalizes" in making it more difficult for the "same tutors" to meet and to converse with students over meals.

The rent proposal was not only insensitive to the importance of tutors, it contradicted the position of administrators who have declared support for strengthening the educational role of the Houses. Dean Epps, in his interview, advocated stronger emphasis on the Houses as an advising system, as a source of department tutorials and independent work, and as an other source of formal courses. Epps called strengthening the tutor system "absolutely crucial" and House courses a way to get senior faculty back in touch with tutors and with undergraduates.

BROAD POLICY GOALS aside, the rent proposal did not even reflect the real position of married tutors in the Houses. Good tutors sacrifice in time and in privacy, and tutors' spouses do play a substantial role as advisors. President Bok, on March 9, 1971, also stated that the Houses should provide non-academic role models for undergraduates, a role which tutors' spouses may be best equipped to fulfill.