In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

66 5 DEAN MONRO 1958–1962 If you are looking for a clear description of Monro’s duties as dean, you will not find it in the official Records of the Dean of Harvard College, even though they stretch back to 1889. Instead, you will get a motley list of roles the dean is expected to fill: “teacher, friend, counselor, and disciplinarian to undergraduates .” Monro described the job in more colorful terms: “The Dean . . . is the man whose job it is to stand on that hot boundary between the interests and standards of the institution, on the one hand, and the interests and rights and welfare of the individual” (“Leighton Speech”). Unlike Yale, where the dean of the college oversaw both academic and social life, Harvard split those duties between the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who supervised both graduate and undergraduate academics, and the dean of students, who supervised student life (Samuelson, “Monro’s Altruistic Instinct”). This arrangement left the dean of the college to carve out a space between his two fellow deans. The territory Monro coveted was the rocky terrain of educational policy, and he succeeded so thoroughly in infiltrating it that Time credited him with upgrading “the vague deanship to make it one of Harvard’s most influential offices” (“Act”). Monro’s lack of a graduate degree was a handicap, but in his defense he could point to wunderkind Dean of Faculty McGeorge Bundy, who did not have one either. In lieu of a graduate degree Monro brought to the job a unique perspective shaped by his experiences as a student, News Office writer, counselor for veterans, assistant provost, and financial aid director. He saw the two sides of the deanship as complementary rather than contradictory because educational theory shed light on many of the problems that sent students to his office or caught his attention. What a new Dean does for his first year is make mistakes, hang on for dear life, and learn a new lesson every day about his college. —john u. monro 67 DEAN MONRO, 1958–1962 In fact, one of his early failures occurred precisely because he ignored the link between academics and residential life. Attempting to create a tutorial program for non–honors students, he had already proposed that a yearlong course be listed in the catalog when a housemaster pointed out that the plan would work only if it was conducted at the house level. Properly chastened, Monro concluded, “All of us are specialists and workers, but all of us are citizens too; and the House, though paying heed to the problems on the academic side, is really a center where men learn to deal with one another, in short to be effective members of a community” (“Leighton Speech”). This early lesson in the consequences of proposing change in a vacuum shaped Monro’s later, more collaborative administrative style; henceforth, with a few notable exceptions, he took pains to consult those who would be most affected by a policy before he made up his mind about it. DEFINING THE DEANSHIP Freshman Seminars Both in the classroom and in the Financial Aid Office, Monro had witnessed adjustment problems among overcommitted freshmen, whom he described as “spinning madly with one toe on the ground.” To make the first year of college less frantic and more meaningful, Monro proposed to the Committee on Educational Policy a roster of freshman seminars based on student participation rather than the traditional lecture format (“Monro Suggests”). As a model he pointed to David Riesman ’31, whose social science students were required to participate in classroom panels and critique their cultural environment (“CEP May”). In May 1959 a pilot freshman seminar program, proposed by the committee and approved by the faculty, enrolled 10 percent of the freshman class in the kind of seminar Monro had described (“Faculty Approves”). A year later the faculty voted to double the program and extend it for another three years; those teaching seminars included Radcliffe president Mary Bunting, Bundy, and Monro (“Report on Freshman Seminar”). Monro had been teaching the freshman writing course since 1953, and he was eager to try out the new formula he had thrown his weight behind. Unlike most of the seminar descriptions, which attempted to draw the best and brightest students, Monro specified in the catalog that his expository writing seminar was open to “students whose experience in writing had been meager, as well as [18...

Share