DEAN SPERRY FINDS BITE OF GADFLY WHOLESOME

Dean Willard L. Sperry, Dean of the Theological School and Bartlet Professor of Sacred Rhetoric on the Andover Foundation, has written the following review of the Gadfly, issued today by the Liberal Club after a lapse of over a year.

In the Century dictionary I read as follows, "Gadfly. The popular name of sundry flies which goad or sting domestic animals. They are comparatively large, very active, voracious and bloodthirsty, with great powers of biting, the mouth parts being highly developed. They also have great powers of flight. The bite is deep and painful, often drawing blood, though not poisonous. In strictness, only the females are gadflies, the males being smaller and quite inoffensive, living on the juices of plants. There are more than a thousand species."

Thus reassured that I should suffer no pain and lose no blood by exposing myself to the "smaller and quite inoffensive" members of the species, of avowed vegetarian habits, I have run the risk of upsetting the tranquil quiet of a vacation day by opening the door to the flying galley proofs of this Student Liberal Club publication.

Knock Docility of Ass

The three most considerable articles, "Tame Asses", "Learning", and "Too Many Educators", address themselves to the absorbing problem of ourselves as undergraduates, graduates, and teachers. The caption of the first article not only has a flick at current fiction; it recalls a profoundly significant remark of Mandell Creighton's that. "After we have got rid of the ape and the tiger we shall have to dispose of the donkey, a much more intractable animal." It is reassuring to find the Liberal Club trying to put spirit and glorified common sense into the head of this domestic brute. The burden of the complaint is the submissiveness of the creature. I once heard a wise man say that what struck you, as you compared the American student with the European student, was the "docility of the American student. Seeming to attack the system, whether of undergraduate credits or doctor's theses, these three papers, are really attempting to sting the student out of his docility. The good student is always an "intractable animal" and how to get rid of him" is the eternal problem of education. With the general theses of these papers most of us are in entire accord. William James said much of it years ago in his memorable essay about the "Octopus", but more power to those who think that it is worth saying over again, forever, in all its permutations and combinations.

A whimsical paper on "The Gentile Boys at Harvard" plays lightly and in high spirits with a thorny subject. A paper on "The Technique of the Stench" keeps well to windward of the ventilators of the cultural laboratory.

Religion Receives Attention

"Religion in Cambridge" receives due attention. Under the guise of inviting us to Satanism and its forbidden fruits, the writer gets in some stout work in behalf of the Anglo-Catholic position in matters ecclesiastical, and conveys certain, prosy information as to the local status of that denomination, which might adorn any church year book. Appleton Chapel is dismissed as a "sad memorial, to the dry bones of New England Liberalism." So be it. I preach there occasionally. Who am I to question it? But I can subscribe whole heartedly to the statement that "the most deeply religious element of the services of the University chapel is undoubtedly the music." Whatever be the bounds of this valley of dry bones, it ends with the rail of the choir left. No one would accuse Dr. Davidson of being dead-and-alive.

Tabanidae Talk of Spring

The appropriate spring touches are added by a dialogue between two Tabanidae see classification of Diptera a house fly and a horse fly, having it out through the screen, and by two bits off free verse. One poet thinks that the "buttercup virginity" of the faculty would be more poignant if it could be "decently lyrical." Perhaps this plaint may sting some "mute inglorious Milton" to verse. After all Homer begged his way through seven cities. The vernal note is again struck in a final celebration of James Christopher Grant reading Plato's "Kriton" to the undulations of his rocking chair. When he gets through with the "Crito" he will have to read the "Apology" and there, alas, the Socratic gadfly is waiting for him.

Query? Is this publication rightly named? Ought it not to be called "The Polican"? The wholesome vein of incisive self criticism suggests not the gadfly but that other mythical creature that pecks out its own heart to feed posterity with the blood of its own wretchedness. It is a good thing for any community to be required from time to time to watch a procession of "penitentes" scourging their own backs. It saves the rest of us from the worst of all sins, the slo of complacency