FORUM

The suggestion contained in The Mail has been found fallacious in practice, and is peculiarly inapplicable to Harvard. The occasional letter is probably perused more readily than the ever-present editorial; but the substitution of editorial columns by a popular forum was, to mention only the one instance of The Traveler, unsatisfactory, from the fundamental cause that no individual opinion carries the prestige of collective opinions, backed by the policy of a newspaper. Furthermore, the editors are automatically in a position to have more information about University affairs than does the average undergraduate, and therefore to interpret them, if not more expertly, at least more comprehensively.

Harvard would be perhaps the least favorable environment for such an attempt. Where a student body is unanimous in its approvals and disapproval's, a newspaper constantly opposing it deserves no consideration as a representative of undergraduate ideas; but in the fifty-one forty-nine division characteristic of the University, the CRIMSON's policies, though never claiming to present student opinion, necessarily find some proportion of favor. Whenever the opposition to its statements, inevitably great under such conditions, grows to the stage of pen and paper, the columns have been ready to admit criticism to the loss of editorial space. The disagreeing one-half may always make itself heard; but the spinelessness of a student newspaper depending entirely on outside stimulus for whatever it prints is completely opposed to Harvard's tradition and love of independent thought.