Taking His Advice

Besides creating a new social role for the FDO, Moses has over the years expanded upon the FDO's traditional services in the realm of advising.

Moses says he is especially pleased with the improvement in the quality of first-year advising. He attributes this change largely to intensive training workshops he instituted for the 65 proctors and 150 non-resident advisers which form the grassroots of the first-year administration.

"From any point of view, freshmen advising is quite complex, quite well-done, and the changes that I've seen are that more and more topics have been taken up and that advisors are better trained and more accountable," Moses says.

Although Moses acknowledges that there are frequent complaints about advising, he maintains Harvard's advising system is far superior to that of other colleges. He readily admits that standardized advising may range in quality, but adds that a lot of advice at Harvard can be found "in the air," whether that means a chance sentence a student reads in The Yard Bulletin or an offhand remark made by a proctor.

"We want to strike a middle ground between coddling the freshmen and leaving them bereft," Moses says. "Lots of freshmen I have known think of themselves as being left to sink or swim. Freshmen have been so well-served by their senior advisors without knowing it; there is no way of communicating it to them. Freshmen everywhere complain."

Besides supervising the advising system, Moses has grappled with other standard problems confronting first-year students in the past 14 years, including sexism, racism and aiding students in adjusting to college life.

"We have tried to damp down sexism, racism, classism, veneration of old Harvard for the wrong reasons by laughing at it whenever we've seen it," said Moses. "I think we have tried to take each freshman on his or her own terms--male or female, white or person of color, heterosexual or gay, rich or poor."

But the outgoing dean says he does not feel the efforts he has made have entirely resolved the existing problems.

"We failed," Moses says. "In spite of all of it, there are still persons of color who don't feel like they own the place, women who feel alienated, and people who feel they have to compromise themselves too much to be a part of Harvard."

Besides instituting new programs, Moses has spent much of his time reflecting about the adjustment students must make once they come to college. Moses recently published a book entitled Inside College, which details many students' struggle with newfound freedom and dealing with a diverse community for the first time.

Moses says making decisions within a more open structure is one of the most crucial skills students gain in their first year at college. He adds that adjusting to Harvard's particular community, which has one of the most diverse student bodies, is even harder than the usual process.

"It is an unbelievably varied population at this place because people here are so smart and so opinionated that their differences are very strongly expressed," Moses says.

He says adjusting to this diversity represents one of the most important changes in college life in the past few decades and will continue to be a pressing topic. That issue of community was not discussed 30 years ago, Moses says, when students at the College were almost exclusively white and upper middle-class, and had basically the same notions of what college was for.

"In the 1990s, the challenges of freedom and diversity aren't going away," Moses predicts. "In fact, they'll become fiercer."