WHAT'S IN A NAME?'

With the reorganization of classes at mid-years comes another allotment of seats in the lecture rooms of the large half courses. This ought to involve nothing worse than a few minutes' wait before a seating list; but unfortunately custom has decreed it differently: seating must be alphabetical.

Those who are so ill-fated as to have their surnames begin with W's, Y's, or Z's must sit (if sit at all) in the Fogg Lecture Room, Emerson D, or the New Lecture Hall, some thirty or forty rows to the rear. There is always a restless shifting about of the M's and N's, which to the Y or Z in the shadowland fringe of the lecture room raises just enough counter pulsations in the atmosphere to necessitate a delicate focussing of the outer ear toward the lecturer as a sunflower to the sun, or else induces that semi-sonambulent state of psychological detachment from the boredom of the immediate intellectual rationing. The dodge for those who care is to plead astigmatism or a punctured tympanum; for those who don't, some A's or B's notes or a conference with the Widow.

In the Junior class the A's have a representative proportion in the first three groups of the rank list over fifteen percent better than the Z's. Yet the raw, crude brain was never alphabetically alloted. The system creates alphabetical cliques. Instead of friendships formed by ties of similar tastes, lecture room friendships are made among men by letters. The only man to profit by alphabetical seating is the monitor; for the rest it is an abridging of the evolutionary right to freedom of selection. The German generals card-indexed the War; shall Harvard alphabetize instruction?