Councilors & Tutors

At Harvard there are two kinds of tutors. The first, who draw their salary from the University, are chiefly pipe-smoking, tweedy young faculty members who are supposed to give undergraduates leisurely official coaching for their general examinations. The second form a more interesting group. Housed in walk-up offices around Harvard Square, they are paid by panicky students to provide them with enough last-minute information to squeeze them through any kind of examination, a job usually accomplished in three tense, packed hours. About half the students feel called upon to patronize a tutoring bureau at some point in their careers. Last week the Harvard Student Council, which traditionally acts in concert with University Hall, solemnly took heed of an old and flourishing institution for the first time by appointing a four-man committee "to determine whether the tutoring schools have grown out of their natural proportion and whether any effort should be made to curb their activities."

Most Harvardmen agreed that such action would not have been necessary in the days when Cambridge tutoring was in the hands of William Whiting ("The Widow") Nolen. A summa cum laude graduate of the class of 1884, "Widow" Nolen kept tutoring a genteel monopoly until his death in 1923. Today there are five bureaus in sharp, noisy competition.

Last winter Dean Alfred Chester Hanford had old Manter Hall School and young University Tutors legally enjoined from selling copies of lecture notes on the ground that lectures were the common-law property of the University. Other bureaus have been dragged into court by publishers for mimeographing and selling digests of copyrighted textbooks. The small, hustling Parker-Cramer bureau sorely tries the University's patience by advertising a Pay As You Pass system that guarantees a grade of D, charges a sliding scale rate thereafter. And there has been a growing undercurrent of tales about students who have had themes, course papers, and even theses for honors ready-written at tutoring bureaus.

Biggest and reputedly best of Harvard's bureaus is run by Harold ("Hal") Wolff. Tutor Wolff, who graduated magna cum lande in anthropology in 1929, launched the practice of advertising in the Harvard Crimson his willingness to be of assistance in preparing for approaching examinations. He rents a floor in a dingy building directly across from the freshman dormitories, hires 21 assistants, tutors about 500 students a year. Rates are $4 an hour for private work, $2.50 for class reviews. Tutor Wolff's proudest boasts are that he has never run afoul of University Hall, that he can tutor a great number of advanced courses himself, that he numbers among his clients Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., and his brother John.

Although undergraduate tutoring bureaus appear in some form on most sizable U. S. campuses, they are actually characteristic only of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, where students have enough distractions and enough money to make them a paying convenience. They are often found running in conjunction with full term cram schools which prepare athletes for college.

P: Yale's leading tutors are the brothers Samuel and Harris Rosenbaum, who learned their trade when they were in Sheffield Scientific School and have plied it profitably since their graduations in 1907 and 1908. The Rosenbaum staff divides its time between New Haven and nearby Milford School which the brothers founded as a preparatory academy in 1916. Rival Elm City School is headed by Nathan Francis of the class of 1902, who was a Yale instructor until 1912 when the University asked him to choose between his jobs. Tutor Francis also owns a preparatory school at Cheshire, Conn. The University has been trying to undermine both schools by providing a Tutoring Service manned by self-supporting students.

P: Distressed Princeton underclassmen rely on John Gale Hun, who also runs the expensive Hun School (tuition: $1,800). Tutor Hun has a sizable staff, a man Friday in wiry John I. Harvey, who was Jack I. Horovitz when he graduated from Princeton in 1925. Princeton's comprehensive upperclass examinations cannot be easily crammed for. Hun's patrons are almost exclusively freshmen and sophomores. Princeton has never taken official notice of Tutor Hun, except to protect dullards from a flood of Hun mail by ruling three years ago that failures in courses should not have their names publicly posted.

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