Home Life

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer will names be withheld.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

May I be as heretical as to venture the opinion that over-indulgence in confinement "with as fine a group of men as will be associated with the House as Tutors and with as comfortable and agreeable surroundings as the Houses would afford" may not be as healthy as it is agreeable. It would be well suited to prep schools or graduate schools or any other highly specialized institutions. It would indeed produce a highly specialized sort of life, like that in the English universities or the small colleges in America. Indeed it seems that college life is inevitably too specialized, and that one thinks quite naturally of the students in the different colleges as leading one kind or another of very unnatural lives--except at Harvard, which is notoriously different. It by good fortune has been so disorganized and well nigh chaotic that it might almost be called natural. Or, perhaps, Harvard has not so much ruled out the yeast as to remove all those leavening distractions which to some degree save the student from the set and sterile point of view of its academic side, its ever-encroaching zeal for "scholarship", and the bugbear of the graduate schools. Our critics are wont to accuse us of being unbalanced if not actually drunk, however.

The point is, that if we can keep our Houses from being hot-houses, they may give us not just collegettes, but more college. Old Jawn may have less reason to feel indifferent, it is true, and may charm the world with fewer dilettantes. But we might have more good football. We might even play Princeton again, who knows? But we must eat out. That is some of the time. John Bliss, '31.