As for the social picture, I've not been particularly successful. We are both looking for that one woman to make our life complete. And she's not easy to find (I happen to want a lot in a woman and prove willing to accept very little less. I guess you're that way as well). And, at least for the last few years for me, there has been a lot of pain in the process. Every time I find someone who I would really like to get to know better and truly get involved with, something doesn't work out. That usually means that she wants nothing to do with me...

I tend to be confident in school and do fairly well, it is socially that I have my problems and get disenchanted I always try my best to treat people well and help people whenever I can. As for my troubles, I usually get treated badly I'm the guy who people count on to help them through hard times. But when they are doing well, they don't even know I exist. When I'm really low I tend to think that I Leo Durocher's baseball expression. Nice guys finish last also apple to social relations But I have not become that cynical on life yet. I'm still confident that things will turn just waiting for all that good to start coming into my life.

There are many caretakers at Harvard and Radcliffe. On the front lines are proctors and advisors in the Yard and tutors in the Houses When I was a resident tutor in Duster House, innumerable students would knock on my door, usually late in the evening, and want to talk Problems of loneliness far outweighed concern about studies. When I was a section man in a Humanities course, two students individually came to me and said that they liked one another but were too shy to ask each other out I got them two tickets next to each other for a concert to Sanders Theater Then they were able to start dating in the '60s the concern of Dunster House tutors that many students remained isolated in their rooms on Saturday evenings be came so great that pairs of us took turns giving parties in the Senior Common Room Curiously, some of the very most attractive Radcliffe students came to these gatherings.

I believe that the overly competitive atmosphere here has an enormous amount to do with this loneliness. As Dr. Blaine again observes: "Men and women who are being compared in regard to their intellect, creativity, and conscientiousness--as students tend to be when they are competing for grades--become ill at ease and even suspicious in their dealings with each other." In some countries, such as Japan, where the number of places in universities is quite limited and almost everything in terms of success in later life depends on one's performance on a few examinations, such self-hate and rejection develops that suicide is frequently the result.

WHAT CAN be done to case the situation? The Freshman Seminar Program is one venture which has been very successful. Its small classes and unguarded nature often allow for great friendship and creativity. I have long been a proponent of House courses. It has been, by far, the most enjoyable teaching I have done at Harvard, with the possible exception of teaching a small group of undergraduates Shakespeare. Joyce, Yeats and Robert Lowell. In a 1973 article in the Harvard Law School Bulletin I described the joys of dealing with students on an intimate basis in may year-long Dunster House course on constitutional law.

The course was taught in the evening. Before it, we usually are dinner together, often with a guest who was an expert in the topic under discussion. For example, many of the cases we were studying were in the field of school desegregation and reverse discrimination. J. Harold Flannery, then Director of the Harvard Center for Law and Education, was a frequent guest, as was Archibald Cox, who had field an amicus curie brief in DeFunis v. Odegard, involving the question of whether a law school may constitutionally give preference to members of racial minorities. When the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wode, the celebrated abortion case, was handed down, our guests included a professor with an appointment at both the Divinity School and School of Public Health, a Roman Catholic nun, a pregnancy counselor at the Harvard University Health Services and a physician from the Massachuseets General Hospital. The purpose of this was more than informational. It was to provide intimate contact with a variety of professionals to help the students sort out possible career decisions. Some students even ended up getting summer jobs with our guests.

In addition to giving students rigorous exposure to analytic thinking through use of the Socratic Method, the course aimed to create a sense of community--to alleviate the loneliness and isolation which seemed so prevalent to me and other tutors. So many students want personal contact with at least one teacher and seldom get it at a research-oriented university like Harvard, save, perhaps, from their tutor. The instructor who teaches a course in the fashion often pays a price. There are countless requests for recommendations One follows, and frequently is asked advice from, students at major turning points all through their lives--in graduate school or law school, at the time of securing a first job of making a career change, at the time of marriage and always sadly, at the time of breakup of relationships I have similar relationships with two of my teachers, my college tutor, David Bevington, and Andrew Kautman, whom I had in a small seminar in constitutional law at the Law School I'am certain that I have gone into teaching and care about students glorious--example.

The hope that House courses would provide a "community" became apparent to me after I was given the results of anonymous taped interviews with members of my class done behind my back conducted by the Harvard University Office for Tests.

Students 6:

I think it is very, demonstrable in most section of large course that there is a great deal of peer group intolerance . . . a sort of lack of respect for other people's opinions and views. It is sort of tight high pressure Whereas in this senior this House course although academically and intellectually you are constrained to be under a lot of pressure, thinking about it, constantly working, there isn't intolerance towards other people's ideas it's much more of a communal thing I think that helps a lot.

Students 4

it does give a sort of sense of community without being overbearing and a burden on People who aren't in the House. But. . to get a sense of community you need some kind of core(which a nucleus of House members in the course Provides)as long as the People in that core are not so tight that other people feel left out. That's the only danger.

uch simple things as providing refreshments in class were appreciated far out of proportion to their cost:

Student 1:

People referred to this before but Harvard is, to some extent, an isolated and isolating place. It doesn't have to be. I don't have to be. I don't think that is peculiar to Harvard, but I can see a lot of lonely people here who just go back to their rooms after their seminar. In The Development of Law there is some sense of community, and may be this is partly because it is a House course. There are refreshments and all the little mechanisms do add up to a looseness and an easiness like with people and with the teacher.