ASTRIDE OR SIDESADDLE

The judicial position which time, fortune and fortitude have gained for the Senior, model of 1928, has provoked at least one of them into the immortality of forthright statement. The Advocate for this month quotes him who said that "within thirty years there would exist no Harvard publication run by undergraduates". This conclusion proceeds from evidence that is lively and undeniable from the point of view of fact; the belief that outside activities, athletic and non-athletic, are on the wane at Harvard.

While it cannot be said that the Harvard undergraduate has only now discovered scholarship, it is undeniable that the stimulus to intellectual endeavor is greater than it probably has ever been before. The falling off in extra-curricular activity is a natural concomitant. The undergraduate publication stands upon the judgement of its own creators.

When weighing the publication in the scales of preparation for life it were unfair to place scholarship itself in the other scalepan. The undergraduate attitude at Harvard is a nebulous thing on many points, but not on this one. And since the ghost of the Big-Man-in-His-Class shows only a periodic taste for walking, it seems fair to believe that Harvard undergraduate publications offer the same reward as any other serious, nonathletic outside activity of college life: experience with human beings.

Experience of the workaday kind that might, like the coffee grinder at the bottom of the sea, go on turning out a man's salt for the rest of his life. An ordeal of caricature for both innocent and the guilty has been won by the swollen importance of undergraduate publication activity in the eyes of a self-conscious few. In reality these are outnumbered by the many who see it merely as one of the ways of learning his own possibilities. Such training may rarely produce vocational certainties and its specific usefulness is as various as individuals. Yet it is a testing wand which, if the student is earnest, often betrays many an unknown vein.

Expenditure for this kind of knowledge is made in the precious coin of time. Few things in college are more difficult than the budgeting of knowledge and self appraisal. Two who have reached extreme conclusions about outside activity may sit nearby in classes, each a living reproach of the other, and each with an albatross about his own neck. What is amiable weakness in a Senior is a fault in them. They have dared to dogmatize, where to dogmatize is intellectually fatal.