"MOTHER ADVOCATE"

Mr. Allen, in his review of the current Advocate, offers to its editors some very substantial and constructive criticism. He points out that the Advocate tends to become weak and ineffective because it seemingly pursues a policy of calling its material from the composition courses of the University and because it makes little or no effort to go out after its stories, but rather waits for them to be handed in by voluntary and unsought contributors.

The Advocate has always been in a difficult position. On the one hand it has striven desperately not to be "collegiate"; on the other it has faced the danger of becoming dry and academic. As Mr. Allen says--the Advocate has never been cheap. But in avoiding Scylla it has approached dangerously near Charybdis.

Between the two evils it has not chosen the lesser. Its studied avoidance of bad taste has often appeared too nearly identical with what is generally thought of as "Harvard indifference." In its recall from cheapness it has often gone too far in pursuit of dignity--of a dignity that attempts patently to appear either sophisticated or mature.

The result has been that the Advocate has forgotten that it is and must be an undergraduate publication; that it must be a medium of expression of the more active intellectual element of the college rather than the element which is merely intellectual without being active.

Mr. Allen's suggestion that the editors seek more to meet the demand of their public than to collect literary gems strikes at the root of the weakness,--past, present and future. An adoption of the suggestion would do much to make the Advocate more effectively fill the place which exists for it in the college community.