RASPBERRIES FOR HARVARD

In his article, "Harvard: Fair and Cooler", in the latest Saturday Evening Post, Mr. Kenneth L. Roberts bites the hand that fed him, apologetically but severely. His caricature of the Harvard he saw and the Harvard men who tried to interpret Harvard for him is a diabolically clever masterpiece. He takes a couple of thousand words to prove that Harvard men are egocentric asses trying to appear indifferent when they are not, starving in Harvard Square hashhouses, and lying prostrate in idolatrous worship of the Great God Final Club. He takes a concluding paragraph to show that Harvard men are studious and passable. The result is a highly spiced article of sure-fire appeal to a public which wants its college atmosphere belching fire and brimstone.

There will be no cries of outrage on the part of undergraduates in the ears of Mr. Roberts not attempts to out-Herod Herod on the part of the men whose "semi-idiotic obtuseness" he lampoons. The "extra-thick coats of indifference", which he says are a "lot of hooey", will at least protect his victims from the shower of garbage loosed by his glorification of the exception in place of the rule. The only men who will even feel embarrassed are those whom he pictures at luncheon in a prominent undergraduate club--he suggests the "Soup Club"--under such names as "Shock-Haired" and "Serious-Face". They will wonder if they realty said what he says they said.

If Mr. Roberts is right, there are a great many things wrong with Harvard. The traditional atmosphere is a take, the College is over-infested with a queer specimen called a "dean," Harvard men are enthusiastically indifferent and "run screaming" when attempts are made to penetrate this false cloak of self-consciousness, the names of all clubs are asinine, the College is run by temperamental Student Council Reports, graduate school students are social pariahs because they have lost "the true Harvard bloom", and, most significant of all, the "cozy collegetts" (Mr. Roberts' nomenclature for the units of the House plan) constitute an artificial attempt to eradicate snobbery,--and ad infinitum.

In the last analysis, Mr. Roberts himself frees the Harvard man from paying any serious attention to his lurid pronunciamento, in which a few good points are so mingled with the numerous bad ones as to show the author was not in a position to distinguish between them. He points out that Harvard men are immune from the literature and motion pictures which take the American undergraduate for their subject. It is all for the best even though the medium is the genial and appreciative Mr. Roberts.