THE HARVARD MAGAZINE

The present issue of the Harvard Magazine indicates that its editors are coming to realize the mark for which they must aim if the magazine is to succeed. The opportunity for the Harvard Magazine lies in the field of the unusual and the unconventional; the Advocate by custom and tradition covers the ground of the conventional story and essay. The opening for the Harvard Magazine is not in an attempt to rival the Advocate and to compete with it on its own ground, but to branch out into new and at present unexploited fields.

On its first appearance it made an effort to break away from the somewhat stultifying literary atmosphere of the Advocate by printing a series of articles, some of them rather objectional, intended to set the college-world both thinking and talking. Since those first two numbers it has been gradually declining into a more commonplace and normal state in which it is satisfied to print the usual type of college article and story. Its first number of the present year is sufficient proof that it had forgotten the purpose with which it set out. Such titles as "The Football Team," "Harvard's Glee Club," and an article on the band show clearly that the effort was rather toward replacing the Advocate than toward establishing a separate field. Harvard can easily support two literary magazines, but it is doubtful if it will support two which are almost identical in purpose and method.

The foregoing does not mean that the Harvard Magazine should turn "Bolshevik" or exploit the sensational merely for the disturbance it can create but that it should turn its attentions rather toward the contemporary than the collegiate literary, the unusual than the unexpected. In the University as elsewhere there is a wealth of liberal thought and discussion which at the present has little chance of being represented in any college publications. Much of it the Advocate does not desire to print, and more would never be turned in to it because of the Advocate's policy of standing by the conventional. If the Harvard Magazine were to tap this stored-up fund of liberal theory and practice it would encourage a rich flow of vital and thought-provoking material.

It is not sufficient for the Harvard Magazine to take its place as an accepted and normal college literary publication: It must branch out into new fields and give an opportunity of expression to the men of the University whose thinking leads them to question the existing theories and standards.