A Family Affair?
But some people argue the biggest problem is not the style of the evaluation but what having a formal evaluation might mean for the future of community within the Houses.
They argue that student evaluations of their tutors could form a rift between students and tutors rather than bring them closer together.
Last year, as discussion about tutor evaluations became more serious, Georgi sent out an e-mail to the other Masters enumerating his view that the surveys would only be detrimental to his House.
“We think of Leverett House as a very large family,” Georgi wrote. “Like a family, it is organized in a very complicated and not entirely logical way...But it works because we are in a community in which people care for one another.”
Georgi said he thinks that while his House is not perfect, its tutor system does work pretty well. And he does not think evaluations are the answer to working out the kinks.
“When something is not working, we don’t think that the way to deal with it is to have people fill out forms,” he wrote to the other Masters. “That generally leads to a hardening of positions and more polarization. We live together. We can do better than that.”
Georgi says he hopes students feel comfortable enough to talk to their tutor or Master if they have a problem with a tutor.
But tutors and students say that while it is nice to think of the House residents as a family, they realize that tutors are College employees, not surrogate relatives.
“You can see it wouldn’t be nice to live somewhere and feel that people are summing you up, but at the same time the CUE Guide is immensely important,” Cooney says. “The idea of family is huge, but we’re not actually a family. It is a job and it’s good to know how to do it well.”
Quincy resident Timothy B. Urban ’04 says that maintaining the professionalism of the tutors is more important than fostering a friendly atmosphere.
“I don’t feel like it’s much of a family,” Urban says. “It’s much more important that the tutor does their job.”
Eliot resident Rachel A. Stein ’04 says she does not think the tutor evaluation survey has harmed her House’s sense of community.
It remains to be seen what effect the surveys will have on House life once the results are actually compiled by the Office of Instructional Research and Evaluation and sent back to the Masters—something Ware says he expects to happen within about a week.
Ware says the results will not be released to the public because of the experimental aspect of the survey, which he calls a “rough instrument.”
“Since this is first time out, we don’t really have a sense of how this is going to perform,” Ware says.
—Staff writer Anne K. Kofol can be reached at kofol@fas.harvard.edu.