An Understanding Alumnus?

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To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Diagnosing Harvard's case has become a popular pastime, I note from the contest that has just closed. These are troubled times. But Harvard's case is not unique, if what we observe at large in the world today is a true index. Europe's case occupies a large place in the cross-word puzzle section. New England's case is another problem. Business also is raking over the old, discarded opinions and looking through a harvest of new ones for just one that will make a prescription.

If there's anything specific ailing Harvard today, I should hazard the opinion that it is evolution. It's quite prevalent everywhere, they say. Unfortunately the disease is incurable. Of course, like a good patient, we fight against it, but with all our opinions, with all our doctors, we're going to take a licking. We don't like it. We don't like anything that's distasteful. Change affects us complacent puritans woefully. But we'll bruise our heads against the next century trying to stop it.

The problem is not in a cure, but in a show down of the facts and in a readjustment of ourselves to them. The semitic bogie has had its innings. The picture of the college swallowed, hide, hair and hoofs, by the graduate structure of the university has been flashed before us. The club system has been given Hector's ride around the walls. They're still there and they'll probable remain there for aught our diagnosing and I don't know as I know why they shouldn't. If there's one thing that can and will change them it's the same evolution of things that's causing all the worry now.

What, as Americans, our forefathers and our peers have done in bring the semitics here, we, also as Americans, must submit is done and, we had better make the best of it--and the best is education, not suppression of native facilities that must possess some latent good. But away with argument. they're here, in Harvard, and nobody's going to put them out, not even supposing that it were desired to put them out. They are part of our cosmopolitan structure, our democratic structure. If you please. They have some with evolution and other things and they'll stay, with or without the other things as we choose or do not choose intellectually to assimilate them. What's more, they'll outlive the club system at Harvard, which evolution will take care of in her own good way and time.

If there were one point on which I should quibble, it would be the club system, but I regard it as too unimportant to matter. The Harvard club system is a strange creature. Evolution put the dinornis and the plesiosaur down and piled mountains above them. This other freak with gold feet may yet join them in innocuous extinction. But whether or not, the great mass of Harvard men will come and go and scarcely heed. Harvard's democracy is untrammeled, but it flourished anywhere at Harvard but in a clubroom.

I take it that most of the unrest about Harvard's state has sprung from the old grads pining for the panty days. The democratic student at Harvard would not be aware of any menace to the grand old institution were it not for the atmosphere of dread east over the place by the old gravis, who treasure the past like a sacred jewel. But the past is forever being violated, and it happens that this is an era of particularly swift and radical change, natural and orderly, nevertheless. A brass task? Or a doctor? I think we need the brass tack. E. Austin Benner '18