AN UNSATISFACTORY RULE

With the approach of the Christmas season there reappears that phenomenon, common to periods just before and after all vacations, of the untoward depletion of undergraduate ranks. Dean's List men take their legitimate departures, but not they alone; those individuals who remain behind find themselves burdened by the necessity of doing double and even triple duty in the matter of classes; and monitorial slips come to bear even less than their customary relation to actual facts of attendance and more to the monitor's circle of acquaintance. Residences are juggled curiously; individuals who are commonly supposed to live in New York or perhaps Washington--and, in dead, spend their vacations there, succeed in establishing at University Hall temporary residences in outlandish places farther from Cambridge, and set out at an early date in order to arrive in time for the holiday.

With the mild immorality of these familiar practices,--as a matter affecting only individual ethics, there is perhaps no occasion for concern. They are part of a time-honored code in colleges; they even find their parallel in the world at large. But in the mass, they strike an unpleasant note; the well-known subterfuges by which they are effected lead to a distinctly distasteful state of affairs. The University has established a rule concerning attendance at the last class before and the first after a vacation; in its effectiveness can it find its only excuse for existence; with a situation so unsatisfactory as the present there can be nothing but impatience.