TWENTY YEARS OF HARVARD

Tomorrow marks the twentieth anniversary of Mr. Lowell's entrance into the Presidency of Harvard College. The progress of the University during the last two decades is so well known as to render futile any further attempt at review or glorification. Advancement in educational method such as the tutorial system and the plan of concentration and distribution has been matched by a vast increase in number of students and size of the University endowment. The brilliant and far-reaching conceptions of his predecessors have been shaped and welded by President Lowell into a working whole which maintains Harvard in its honored position at the forefront of American education. While the nation has been becoming a world power the University has become a national institution.

The great increase in the size of the University has not been allowed to bring with it the standardization of production which has so often accompanied rapid development in the United States. The three hundred year old liberal tradition of which Harvard is so justly proud, has never been more carefully fostered than during President Lowell's administration. Undergraduate papers have been indiscreet, members of the faculty have outraged bands of zealous alumni, but President Lowell has defended them to the utmost no matter how out of sympathy he may have been with the opinions expressed. His own vigorously independent nature has prompted him to an energetic struggle for the right of the minority to be heard.

It has never been a sin at Harvard to think for oneself and in the particularly violent times directly following the war, many politically unorthodox professors found their sole defense in the President's office. Harvard men were to be allowed the right to hear both sides of a question even if one of these sides were branded as high treason by a majority of alumni. Of all the achievements which the last twenty years have seen-in Cambridge perhaps the greatest is this sturdy maintenance of an honored tradition of rugged Yankee independence.