THESE ABSURD SURVEYS

"Fire Dr. Lowell and pick another president for Harvard," is the sentence with which Dudley Nichols begins his last article on conditions at the University in the New York Evening Post. He attributes this sentiment to a group of alumni. That his whole series is marked by a somewhat hasty and superficial understanding of the attitude of faculty, alumni, and undergraduates is a conclusion which might be drawn by the careful reader from his previous discussions. His final summary bears out this opinion.

That any substantial body of graduates should seriously entertain the thought which Mr. Nichols aseribes to them is beyond reasonable belief. Furthermore, he catalogues these extremists as the type "which regards athletics and social life as the pride and security of Harvard." Just what beneficial effect a change in the presidential chair would have on the football team or the crow or club life is beyond the comprehension of the average mind.

Mr. Nichols assumes here, as he does in the rest of his article, that there is a bitter conflict between scholarship and athletics in the University; and that excellence in the former is incompatible with prestige in the latter. He supposes that President Lowell's development of the tutorial system and his hopes for its fostering of scholarship are regarded by alumni as a blow at athletic superiority and a cause of the University's recent defeats in major sport contests. Absurd as all this sounds, Mr. Nichols goes even further. He implies that the tempest of criticism which has stormed about the administration in past months has been aroused by the fear of alumni that Harvard's athletic reputation is at state. What Professor Baker and the rise of the Business School have had to do with comparative football scores is really somewhat conjectural.

It is not at all true that the point at issue in recent discussions has been "whether Harvard can be simultaneously pre-eminent in scholarship and athletics." It is truer to say that alumni have become fearful that Harvard's broad tradition of scholarship and culture is being sacrificed to the more specialized development of the tutorial system and of certain graduate schools. It is admittedly difficult to strike a satisfactory balance between athletics and scholarship in a college: certainly no just observer can find fault with President Lowell for his present course.

Just as Mr. Nichols has created a false issue between scholarship and athletics, so has he given a false impression of the place which President Lowell occuples in the minds and hearts of graduates. It is only when he points out the necessity of more adequate information on administrative policy that Mr. Nichols gets close to any truth. And that idea is not original with him: nor does it require profound insight.