Frowns on More Pay for Instructors.

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The latest criticism of President Lowell's report to the Overseers seems to me particularly unthinking, even for journalism. The purchase of property between the Avenue and Charles River is a further step toward making Cambridge fit for human habitation. Days may dawn when, in spite of abattoir, trolleys and funeral processions, Harvard will breathe a sense of academic labor and repose. We must not fall into the national blunder of making a desert of empty buildings and calling it scholastic peace, but even such misuse of money would be wiser than the increasing of instructors' salaries.

Harvard has no room for men who are attracted by high pay. Increase of salary would be a further bridging of the narrow gulf that separates us from commercial institutions. Scholars are not out for money, they want to work in sympathetic company, amid congenial surroundings. They run no race with bankers, corporation lawyers, or fashionable practitioners. They are directed toward a different goal. They ask for bread, not for stones.

When Harvard gets enough money, we should almost double our teaching staff. Our instructors would then be delivered from the drudgery of blue-pencilling copy-books, and have leisure for that serious work by which alone an university is made. Give them a chance to be human, and the undergraduate may find professors worthy of his friendship. Then when we have more money, we might equip our poverty stricken chairs with laboratories, theatres, libraries and all the other what-nois. Then, they tell us, their present progress would seem like marking time. Ask our men which they would rather have: endowments or high salaries. Get rid of the money-grubbers. Although we would then, by no means, be free from all the quacks that infest Cambridge, still in the company of those who would remain are found men in whom alone Harvard has real existence.

There are quite a number of instructors whose time is taken up with work that belongs in the nursery and which is shirked by the high schools. When we have made all other reforms, if the cost of living demands it, we shall, as heretofore, increase the salaries of these instructors. But we cannot afford bribes to keep their noses to useless grindstones. We shall still their whines and sap their shoddy patronage of puppy yellow journals, but let it be clearly understood we appreciate that they are incapable of sacrifice.

Personal sacrifice gives vigor to an university. The trick of professional dignity lies in the secret of poverty, which ensures, among discriminating people, simplicity and refinement. The distinction of frugality is the scholar's bulwark: raise it, and he is at the mercy of the horrid monotony of capitalist vulgarity. A professor is admitted to polite society not by dint of theatre parties and champagne, but simply because bourgeoisie and Philistines are in mortal terror of his intellect. Money-grubbers and little-brothers-to-the-rich feel in his indigence a power which deprives them of breath. It is part of the show that he should be poor. Dress him in the fashion, slip a yellow-back into his pocket, clap him into a limousine, and, no matter how brilliant he may be, he is useless, he has lost his spell.

I do not want to shield the professor from our cruel world. Closet scholarship is unavailing in a commercial civilization. The thinker must be in vital touch with the magnificent display of energy precious souls term materialism. But high pay is no means to this end. It creates a barrier where we want a bridge. Salaries higher than a living-wage detach from life: only serious work and sacrifice pay in the end.  JOHN BROOKS WHEELWRIGHT, '20.