THE GREAT PLAGUE

Now is the time when those who possess more money than knowledge take refuge in the intellectual sanctuaries about the Square, there to remain except for recurrent dashes to the Waldorf--until the period of the Great Plague is over. There that exotic bloom known as a college education can be cultivated "under glass", and many a fragile blossom preserved which, in the open, would never survive the rigors of our northern elimate. And are they not held--like "hot-house" grapes--to be the more valuable because so tenderly and expensively reared?

So it would seem. Never before have the products of our scholastic green-houses been so much in demand; in order to supply the market, our few hardy perennials in the way of tutoring schools, have been reenforced by a host of smaller "bureaus" which have sprung into being, mushroom--like. Nor is it difficult to find the, life-giving force which has coaxed these seedlings through the hard intellectual crust of Cambridge--never before have the rates for tutoring been so high: Our mathematical economists have not been slow to figure out a close relation between the high tariff on "repeated" courses recently enacted at the Bursar's Office and this tremendous increase in the educational transportation charges between Harvard Square and Sever.

Be that as it may, we must face-the fact that Harvard is rapidly becoming a second-rate institution, entirely subordinated to the centres of culture on the south side of Massachusetts Avenue. The University threatens to lapse into a mere examining board, and the tuition into the registration fee in a tutoring course. It is still easy for those who come to college because their parents send them here, and stay simply because it is "the thing to do" to get themselves catapulted through their examinations. And during the rest of the year, there are of course sufficient diversions to keep their brains from dangerous overwork. Granting that these men are here to gain a certain amount of prestige what place in our educational institution can they have who during Plague Week go huddling into quarantine?