FREEDOM AND PRACTICALITY

Among the Harvard College Parietal Regulations for next year is one stating that "No student shall lodge in an apartment house." The change in College regulations embodied in this provision is by no means a sudden one. It has long been contemplated by the College authorities, while the reasons making such a step advisable have even longer been apparent to students as well as officers of the University.

Briefly these reasons may be described as, first a desire to bring all students in the College social life, and second: the necessity of maintaining a certain amount of College supervision over all the dwellings inhabited by students of the College. Whether or not it is desirable for undergraduates to live in definite proximity to other undergraduates is possibly a debatable question. It would be dangerous for a University which boasts the promotion of individuality as its salient care to assert that its members should form associations other wise than as they please. It can hardly, however, be denied that the protection afforded students by a College inspection of living conditions in the buildings open to them is of distinct value. Harvard has long conducted periodic investigation of dormitories and boarding houses open to students: In the case of apartments such inspection is patently impossible.

It is further generally accepted that a college has a right to exercise a certain measure of supervision over its members. That Harvard as well as other colleges has always exercised such a right whether the students involved live in dormitories or apartments is certainly unquestionable.

Complete freedom of self determination is an eighteenth century ideal which has never been further from realization than at the present day. Harvard has for many years allowed its students as full a measure of individual freedom as possible. But this measure has never been, nor ever can be, complete. From time to time circumstances are bound to arise necessitating restrictions on certain phases of an idealistically complete liberty of action and choice. The decision to bar undergraduates from residence in apartment houses need not be viewed with alarm by students as an encroachment on their inherent right of freedom it is rather a practical measure taken to solve practical and specific, difficulties.