THE SIMPLE LIFE

List among facts, for which to be grateful the present system of registration in Harvard College. The undergraduate may feel that his name in his own particular script is as legible as in a hasty printing but he should congratulate himself on the brief time necessary for registration. In the majority of universities, registration is symbolical for standing endlessly in line, for answering countless questions and for filing innumerable bonds. The registration limp is as vital a disease as the writer's cramp and much more prevalent. And the hours which pass while waiting in line are among the bitterest in the human rosary. At Harvard it means little more than a walk to one of various halls and ten minutes spent there while registering. To be sure there are appended duties such as journies to one's tutor and to the Bank, but the main agony is passed when the card is returned and permanently filed.

One might say that the efficiency of this method of registration which is at once so simple for the student and, it is presumed, satisfactory for the University office, is attested by the comparative paucity of errors. It is not at all unusual in other institutions, whose systems are more onerous, for a person to wait as long to rectify a mistake as to make one. Here a student may be as much subject to changes of mind but he can console himself with the thought that he has a reasonable period of grace in which to discover whether or not he will like a certain course or, if he has listed his courses the previous spring, whether he still chooses to take the same ones. The welter of duties which surrounds the opening of each college year is made simpler and less involved because of the genius of the registration office. Only a return to the prehistoric and patience-testing methods would bring about an adequate appreciation of the system now in effect.