"OPEN TO THE PUBLIC."

It may easily be computed that the average undergraduate hears during the course of a year from 250 to 750 lectures. Adding to these the number of entertainments, concerts, and theatrical performances of a more or less intellectual sort attended during the year, the figures may well approach 1000. We are certainly given abundant opportunities--we are even occasionally forced "to sit as passive buckets to be pumped into"--but on the whole this is the method of education that we have come to regard as suitable and adequate, and indeed most of us probably like it.

But the very fact that we are so well provided with opportunities often makes it necessary for us to exercise choice. Naturally our tastes frequently lead a large number of us to the same place. And there, if it be a lecture or a concert "open to the public," what do we find? The very fact that we are given a choice among attractions makes us independent and we do not make unusual preparations for arriving early. So, when we arrive a reasonable time before the hour announced at the Fogg Lecture Room, the New Lecture Hall, or Emerson Hall, wherever the event may be, we are confronted with an audience of ladies and gentlemen evidently in no way connected with the University. And these people occupy the best seats while the students are relegated to the rear.

Any objection to this state of affairs is met by the reply that if it were not for these outside people the lecturer or the musicians would have but a slender audience. We are 10th to admit this. For we believe that many a student is kept away because he has learned by experience that it is scarcely worth while to take a back seat in a lecture, no matter how interesting, when every day he hears others without inconvenience. But we would not for a moment intimate that we advocate the exclusion of the public from lectures and concerts in University halls. On the contrary, we would welcome them most cordially. Nevertheless the CRIMSON believes that they should be admitted only after ample accommodations have been provided for all students who care to come.