At the bottom line, the Faculty created tutorials to accomplish two ends: integrate a field and teach methodology. Graduate students--verve or no verve--lack the breadth of knowledge or expertise of professors that might enable them to attain these high ideals. With only haphazard guidance from a head tutor, graduate student instruction is essentially a case of you pays your money, you takes your chances.

Graduate students themselves concur with Bowersock's argument that professors ideally are the appropriate tutorial leaders. John Gibbons, graduate student Government tutor, agrees that "professors are simply better scholars." However, professors and the University have long ago set priorities that prevent student exploitation of these Faculty skills. Robert N. Brandon, a graduate student who taught Philosophy tutorial three years ago, said the problem partially arose from "faculty members' disinterest in teaching in general, because this is a major research university." Brandon added gently, "It is not that they don't like teaching so much. They just like other things better."

A SIDE FROM RESEARCH, another factor helps to explain Faculty reluctance to lead tutorials--the tutorial relationship itself whittles away at professors' exalted positions. Committee G recognized this pitfall back in the 1920s. The committee report said the effect of tutorials "will be to diminish the prestige of the teacher so far as this is an effect of distance and office. The tutorial calls for fraternity rather than paternalism."

And once the opportunity arose for the faculty to divorce themselves from this fraternity of scholarship, they did so. Bowersock said that in the wake of the graduate student-rich 1960s, Faculty members have come to view the phenomenon of a professor-led tutorial as "an abnormal practice." By the reforms, he added, he hopes to re-establish tutorial instruction as a normal Faculty activity.

However, the departments possess one last line of resistance--the matter of finances. If tutorials are to be staffed completely by professors, Walls points out, departments will simply need to appoint more professors. As Henry Adams remarked, "The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money."

In response, though, Bowersock has one more trump to play. While the administration cannot force a department to comply with the regulations, they can block additional professor appointments until departments make tangible exertions toward increasing Faculty involvement in tutorials. Bowersock is counting on this "power of persuasion" to give teeth to the reforms. Nonetheless, dangling additional faculty appointments before department heads does not address the central issue. Faculty attitude toward the personalized approach of the tutorial process must change, not the shape or size of the reward offered to departments to lure them back to teaching.

The great American experiment is fast approaching its second childhood. If tutorials are ever to regain their value as a pedagogical tool, faculty must collectively commit themselves to the business of educating undergraduates.