There is perhaps no way that the College has improved more in the last 15 years than by the addition of the tutorial program. Regretably (for us), the program started in the fall of 1988. The College summarizes the program as follows:

The Williams tutorial program, initiated in the fall of 1988, promotes exploration of controversial issues through regular reading and writing assignments, followed by critical discussion under the direction of a faculty tutor. The format usually involves two students meeting with the tutor for a weekly session. During each meeting, one of the student pair makes a presentation — for instance, an essay, solutions to a set of problems, a report on laboratory exercises, or a study of a work of art — and then responds to the questioning of the other student and the tutor.

I can’t think of a better way of improving the quality of a Williams education than extending and expanding this program. From a marketing point of view, it also serves to distinguish Williams from its competitor schools. There is a marvelous article about the tutorials in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The whole article is a great read, but some of my favorite passages are:

After the students leave, Mr. Wood says he loves the intense experience of the tutorial method, which he’s been doing for years now. “In a way,” he says, “it’s preserved my love of teaching.”

The history tutorial looks a lot like you might imagine — professor in tweed jacket; cramped, book-lined office. But Williams runs the same type of course in the sciences. In fact, all of the 400-level courses in the physics department are now taught as tutorials.

In Kevin M. Jones’s tutorial on electromagnetic theory, the students don’t offer papers but take turns at the chalkboard, going over the answers to a lengthy problem set. Mr. Jones leans back in his chair, nodding his head and occasionally asking for more details. At one point, his suggestion provides the breakthrough. “That explains our problem,” says one of the students.

The work is the same that the students would do in a seminar version of the electromagnetics course, but in the tutorial they have to really know it, they say. You can’t stand in front of your professor for an hour and fake it.

So true! I would wager that very few students in tutorials fail to do the assignments.

While each session has just two students, the tutor officially has 10 students per semester. The professor separates them into five pairs and meets separately with each group. That means five hours a week in the same class — more than most courses — but professors have to do little preparation other than creating the course and writing the syllabus. “I don’t need a lecture prepared,” says Will Dudley, an assistant professor of philosophy. “Even in a seminar, if no one wants to speak, I have to talk. In the tutorial, they don’t have the option of not talking.”

I wonder how they decided on 10 students (5 sessions) as equivalent to a normal course? (Assuming that this is in fact the ratio.) On one hand, 5+ hours of class time is more than a typical class. On the other hand, the real workload for many classes comes in the paper grading and comment writing. It appears that there is little of that in tutorials. I would wager that the time committement for these tutorials is less than that for any “normal” paper writing Division II or III class with more than 15 students or so.

Even professors who like the tutorials may decide it isn’t the right format for them. Mr. Kohut calls his tutorials “without a doubt, the single-best teaching experience I ever had.” But after teaching the course three times, he stopped. “I had to concede that there’s a part of me that likes being center stage,” he says. “In the tutorial, they’re on stage. Narcissistically, I think as professors we want to be the directors.”

…

But he [Morty Shapiro] acknowledges that teaching a tutorial is hard. “You give up control,” he says. “The students run the damn thing. I’m not trained to give up all that control.”

I am glad to read elsewhere that Morty is such a big fan of the tutorial program. It is also worth noting that Steve Fix, Dean of the College during our years there, is now head of the tutorial program. I can’t imagine a better person for the position.

But perhaps, more than the money, the interest stems from what Mr. Wood, the history professor, says of his tutorial: “This is the essence of what a college course should be.”

During his tutorials on the second floor of Stetson Hall, Mr. Wood leaves the door open because his small office, bulging with books, gets stuffy. But last fall, when a colleague moved in nearby, Mr. Wood was concerned about the noise. One day, Mr. Wood ran into his new neighbor in the mail room, and asked whether the sometimes-boisterous conversations during his five tutorial sessions each week were bothersome.

“Oh no. Not at all,” came the response. “I like the sound of learning.”

What more is there to say? How about: “Come to reunion!” ALthough my daughters do a very poor imitation of the sound of learning, they do great giggles and shreiking.