OBJECTIONS, SUSTAINED

Professor C. J. Sisson, writing on the House plan in this morning's CRIMSON, Has erred twice therein on the side of optimism. In his expectation that students will use tier better opportunity to learn from students he is running headon into a train of Harvard thought that has for the past two years been gathering greater speed in the other direction. Students at Harvard today believe, in general, that there are few time investments that pay such short interest as Conversation and Contacts. The "bull session" is dead, not of the exactness of its titling, but of a realization that it was wasted energy. There is less and less time to spend on the accessible attainments of undergraduate thinking. The clarities and surewon advances of maturity are waiting, in the printed word.

Harvard men need no broad undergraduate intercourse "to supplement" or "even correct the influence by teachers of the university," The fallacy of this thought is in the same category as that of the thorough sinners who make the best saints. Youth, itself is balance enough. And if it be feared that the University would, free from an artificial mixing within itself, turn into a closed circuit of thought, let it be remembered that, short as was the distance from the Capitol to the Tarpeian Rock, the distance from Widener to the Harvard Square rotunda is no longer. Harvard shows no sign of turning aloof from life.

"Nor will this mean a Harvard type, for individuality is fostered, strengthened, and tested by the collegiate system, as our English universities have proven by long experience", adds Professor Sisson. But, as Professor, Richardson says in "Study of the Liberal College" (1924): "Of course there are great differences between the various colleges . . . Some of them, such as Balliol and New College, have set themselves toward a marked degree of scholastic excellence . . . It is very difficult for a college to change its status. In the first place it has acquired a constituency of a fairly definite type . . ." The Harvard plan, painstakingly whitewashed as it has been of all traces of Anglomania, has on this side no resemblance to the Oxford idea.

The method of selecting men is the focal point for discussion of the House plan. No more specific announcement of the University's policy on this point has been announced than that "selection of the members of the three upper classes who will occupy the first dormitory unit will be made by the University authorities, and will be of necessity more or less arbitrary." The report of the Student Council's committee will be closely watched for recommendations on this problem. From the plan's present artificial cross-sectioning Harvard can afford to sacrifice a good deal of the appearance of democracy. The House must never become a temple to a new pantheon of Balanced Forces.