"Intellectual Brothels"

One morning last week Harvard's students and professors were startled when they picked up their copies of the usually sober Crimson, found it flaming with big headlines and an editorial splashed all over the front page:

"Lined up on Massachusetts Avenue, grinning obscenely down over Harvard Yard, there is a row of intellectual brothels. Every year they are patronized by two-thirds of the student body; every year they flout with greater insolence the decency and respectability of this college. . . . They are making a mockery of a Harvard education, a lie of a Harvard diploma. ..."

Object of this outburst, the like of which had not been seen in the Yard for many a year, was Harvard's tutoring schools. It was not the first attack on them.* But it was by all odds the noisiest and most determined. First step in the Crimson'?, campaign was to announce that it would no longer accept tutoring-school advertising. Loss to the Crimson: $2,000 a year. The Crimson proceeded to make sensational charges.

Chief function of the tutoring schools is to prepare students for Harvard's tough written examinations (which largely determine a student's grade in most courses). Housed around Harvard Square, the tutoring schools coach students in groups or individually, cram a full course into a few tense hours, sell review notes, other crutches, charge up to $4 an hour. Where once William Whiting ("The Widow") Nolen had a monopoly of this enterprise, today nine full-fledged tutoring schools flourish in Harvard Square. The Crimson charged that some tutoring schools supplied students with ready-written term papers and theses, steered students into snap courses, "high-jacked" examination papers in advance.

Most amusing disclosure: a tutoring-school pupil last term was Caspar Griswold Bacon (Harvard '08), onetime Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts and now both a special student at Harvard and a member of Harvard College's Board of Overseers. Mr. Bacon, taking a course in American Constitutional Government, crammed at Wolff's and at midyear got an A.

For the fact that "cheating and illegitimate tutoring" is a "large-scale commercial enterprise" only at Harvard, the Crimson held the university partly to blame. Reasons: "the worthless teaching and organization in a great number of courses . . . pedestrian lectures . . . the machine-like routine of Harvard."

Especially galling to Harvard's faculty was the Crimson'?, disclosure that Wolff's had displayed an advertisement showing a robed senior with the caption: "Diploma by Harvard--Tutoring by Wolff."

* Two years ago Harvard's faculty forbade scholarship students to sell their class notes to these schools, whereupon the students took to bootlegging their notes.

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