Dining Hall Waiting as an Opportunity.

(We invite all men in the University to submit communications on subjects of timely interest, but assume no responsibility for sentiments expressed under this head.)

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:--

The Student Council and the CRIMSON are to be congratulated upon the stand they have taken in regard to student waiters. It has been pointed out that the employment of student waiters would make it easier for many men now in the College to work their way through, but even more important would be the effect on the position of Harvard in the coun- try at large.

We are constantly hearing, both from within the College walls and without, that Harvard is not really a national institution, because she draws her students almost exclusively from the East: and this is confirmed by the figures recently published in the CRIMSON, showing that out of 2500 students in the College, only about 150 came from states west of the Mississippi River, and only about 450 from all the territory west and south of Pennsylvania. To remedy this condition and increase the attendance from the Middle West, West, and South, is one of Harvard's big problems; and the scholarships given by the Harvard clubs in various states and by the Associated Harvard Clubs are doing much good in this way. Yet the number of men who receive scholarships necessarily is and always will be limited.

Here is where the question of student employment comes in. At least three-fourths of the students in the universities and colleges of the West are earning their way--nearly all of them, of course, because they have to, a few because they want to. When a man picks out his college, one of the most important factors in his choice is the presence of opportunities for earning money. In most cases the State universities, from Michigan to California, provide all the opportunities for self-support that one can expect, and they emphasize this in their literature. A boy graduating from high school in Illinois knows that it will be comparatively easy for him to make his own way at the University of Chicago or at the State university--easy, that is, compared with what he knows, or thinks he knows, of Harvard. To the handicap of distance, Harvard places upon herself, in addition, that of uncertainty.

Let Harvard create more opportunities for self-help and, like Princeton, attract the country's attention to her democratic and progressive spirit--Emerson had the job of "President's Freshman." The problem of nation-wide representation will then be on the way to a solution, and Western and Southern states will be as well represented at Harvard as is the State of New York.  FREDERICK BUTLER '16.