TIME OUT

"We need more time to think." Every year a large number of Seniors answer the traditional questionnaire by repeating this very old criticism.

After a man has spent three or four years as an undergraduate in Harvard College, he begins to place a new value upon his own thinking. By that time the chances are that he no longer studies as a child, to satisfy a requirement, or fill so many hours with a book in his lap. Study has become a real intellectual experience--a recuperative process by which new ideas flow into his mind.

He makes them his own, and, sooner or later, if he is a true student, there will come a reversal of the process, when these ideas, modeled and shaped by his own individuality, take definite form about some specific problem--probably an assigned thesis, possibly nothing more immediately useful than a jotting in a journal. When an undergraduate has reached this stage in his development, his intellectual future is fairly well assured. The student has found himself.

But by this time, the requirements of daily college life, which were formerly necessary to hold him to his task, have become irksome and constrictive. If he is happy enough to fall into a train of meditation, hardly is he well launched when--"Clang! Clang!" the college bell calls him off to a lecture.

Perhaps he is patient and resigned. If so, he snatches his hat and rushes off to class. The happy moment is gone; but then, "Life itself is inexorable," he murmurs to himself. "A man must learn to live by the rufes."

But instead of being patient he may have what psychologists call a "superiority complex." His schedule says he is due in class. The bell says, "Come!" -- "Damn schedule and bell and the whole infernal family of calendars and clocks!" And he cuts his class.

It may be that this type of cut is un-intelligible to many undergraduates. Certainly, it is inexcusable to a lecturer in a slighted course and to the official machinery in the college office.

It is a strange paradox that American universities make slight provision for the student who really knows how to study. Their rules, regulations, schedules, requirements, examinations--all are made and imposed for the men who either don't know how to study or won't study. Isn't it about time for Harvard, at least, to realize that its primary concern is for those who can and will take their opportunities seriously?

Seniors, as a class, come more nearly fitting this category of students than any other group. And if Seniors are qualified to diagnose their own case their opinion should receive consideration when they say so repeatedly that they need greater freedom than they now enjoy.

One hears it said occasionally that all Seniors in good standing should be given the privileges of the dean's list. Why would this not be a practical plan? At least, it could be given a tentative trial. If this latitude were granted them, we believe that most Seniors would avail themselves of their privilege with discretion and would employ their time to their great, benefit.