ROOMS AND RED TAPE

Now and then, everyone is certain to run up against one or more of the apparently useless University rules. For, unfortunately, the University is far from being free from that "Red Tape" which is the usual concomitant of law and order. But there is one standing regulation that, every year, especially arouse the undergraduate ire because of its stupid inconsistency--this is the ruling that "not more than two men shall inhabit a college room".

In the days when rooms were mostly single, such an ordinance was needed to keep students from crowding into quarters to a degree detrimental to health. But now that the suite is the regular thing, the situation is entirely changed. Yet the statute lingers on. As a result, two men may still "inhabit" a room in Stoughton or Hollis, or four men in two connecting rooms. That is, four men share study and a bedroom together. On the other hand, the same space divided into a study and two bedrooms, on of them often large enough to be classed as "double", must, in the other Yard dormitories, be occupied by not more than two students. These suites, with their separate sleeping quarters, are capable of holding three men with far less congestion than results when four persons live in two rooms in Stoughton or Hollis. Yet the latter is permitted, while the former is not.

All this is the outcome of lumping suites and single rooms together without distinction. Especially in these days of increasing cost of living here at Harvard, this arbitrary classification is both expensive and unfair. Either the number of men allowed to live in a room in Stoughton and Hollis should be reduced, or, better still, the other three room suites in the Yard be thrown open to three inmates. The least that those in authority can do in to remedy this inconsistency at once, and not hamper the student body by imposing entanglements of a wantonly deep shade of crimson.