THE VOICE OF AUTHORITY

While magazine after magazine gives up its pages to discussions of the undergraduate and his alleged difficulties, it is only fair that some space should be given to those who are concerned no with the grades of four courses a year but with the results of all of them. While Mr. "Pussyfoot" Johnson hazards his opinion on college drinking, while the students busy themselves with more pressing problems, the old questions of how to administer a college are not as yet completely solved.

Under the title "Treat Us Like Men," Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton College discusses, in the current Saturday Evening Post, the vagaries of the undergraduate mind, conscience, and particularly the sense of liberty. It is a wise and humorous treatment of a subject which must have driven many a dean in many college to the borders of insanity-the student who, when haled into court for over-cutting or neglect of studies, waves the banner of liberty and demands to be treated like a man; and who, when confronted later with some such item as a bill for broken furniture, waives his right to adult standing and asks that the bill be sent to his father.

Speaking of the results of allowing students to attend classes at their own discretion, he points out the obvious fact that not only the less interesting lectures but also those which come on Saturday and Monday mornings are liable to extreme neglect. The modifications, however, which are being made in the lecture system at Harvard must necessarily make some change in the point of view of both undergraduate and dean. Where lectures are cut short six weeks, the undergraduate is more likely to learn all he can through lectures before being thrown on the more difficult, if more scholarly, road of his own resources during a reading period. And where a student's work is not confined to lectures but embraces tutorial work, absence from lectures does not necessarily mean that he is neglecting all his college duties.

As to the other matters of which Dean Gauss writes, such as the resentment against any interference by the authorities in outside activities, athletic and non-athletic, such a feeling is not strong at Harvard. The fields which are left largely to the control of the authorities, those in which the authorities share the burden with undergraduate managers, and those which are managed entirely by undergraduates, have been determined by experience, and smoothly and on the whole painlessly demarked. Those who are used to breathe the air of freedom are not likely to wave the red flag of rebellion, and it is seldom that it is waved in Cambridge.