COMMON SENSE

The emphasis that Mr. Marvin lays on the Committee on Relations with the Alumni is interest decidedly well placed. Such a needed liaison between graduates and the University office would clear up a great deal of the misunderstanding that has arisen lately. The alumni are dissatisfied too often because they don't know exactly what is going on, and, still worse, have no way of finding out. The newspapers which have in the past been their only means of getting information tell a colored and exaggerated story.

Few alumni are in close enough contact with University affairs ever to know all the facts. As a result the College's reputation has been smirched from time to time by the outspoken opinion of alumni who have had no way of checking up on things, and are yet represented as authorities by the press. The Committee on Relations with the Alumni seems the very cure for all this doubt and misapprehension.

At Yale there has been inaugurated an Alumni Day during the college term set apart for graduates to come back and find out all that the University is doing, has done, and will do. Yale on that date throws its doors wide to every alumnus, invites him to look through every building on the campus, and by official lectures tells him carefully and honestly just how each department is running and why each innovation is being made. This is assuredly a wise and far-sighted policy. Harvard can well afford to take similar pains to bind together graduates, undergraduates, and the University office.