Crammers Crushed

Like "Kitty," "Copey" and the Yard, the private tutoring schools on Harvard Square are one of Harvard's traditions. Ever since "The Widow" Nolen (Harvard '84) started the first of them, they have flourished at Harvard as nowhere else, have crammed into thousands of Harvard men the wherewithal to disgorge for their final exams. But last week, as students plunged into their annual valley of the shadow, most of them had to get through by their own efforts. Harvard had all but put the cramming schools out of business.

It was the Harvard Crimson that turned the trick. Fretting at the Harvard faculty's feeble protests against cramming, Editor Blair Clark (son of New Jersey's witty, arrogantly learned Federal Judge William Clark) denounced the tutoring schools as "intellectual brothels," got the Crimson to refuse their advertising (TIME, May 1, 1939). As the Crimson hammered away, the University joined in by starting a competitive, official tutoring bureau, charging relatively modest rates ($2.50 an hour top; poor students are tutored free).

Last fall, two of the crammers (the University Tutoring School and Fletcher Briggs) gave up the ghost. Early in May the College Tutoring Bureau followed suit. Still busy, however, were the two biggest tutoring schools. Wolff's and Parker-Cramer. Last fortnight, Harvard's Dean A. Chester Hanford socked them in the solar plexus. Any student who attended a commercial tutoring school, he announced, would be "liable to disciplinary action." Harold A. Wolff, proprietor of the biggest school, promptly announced that his school would give up tutoring, would restrict itself to "educational counseling" of students "who have done the work but still do not grasp the material." As Parker-Cramer kept mum, a Crimson photographer crashed one of its classrooms, took a picture of seven students cramming, dashed out with a tutor in hot pursuit. The Crimson printed the picture. Parker-Cramer promptly sued eleven of its members for trespass and libel.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.