Yale Felicitates

President Lowell completed twenty years last week as President of Harvard and we find in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin an appreciative summing-up of his accomplishments during the period. President Lowell's leading interest when he assumed command in 1909 was in quality of performance. With this key to his administration one can follow Harvard's progress since then to the institution that it is today. Socially he has worked during these ten years towards an all-around undergraduate life which began with good conditions for the Freshmen, carried through the athletic and other student interests, and came to a climax in the House Plan, which Edward S. Harkness, '97, has just made possible. In scholarship at Harvard President Lowell has held clear ideas, first to make the Harvard Bachelor's degree stand for high grade of work, and secondly to awaken student interest in scholarship for its own sake. He has, for instance, modernized the choice of studies, broadened the entrance requirements, built up student interest in Honor degrees and, perhaps most interesting of all, introduced the "general examinations" which are the hub on which Harvard now turns scholastically. The "reading period" at Harvard, an offshoot of the "general examinations" has now come to stay as a useful innovation: it apparently allows for just that leisure to turn around that the average student needs before he comes up for his periodic examinations, and it also changes the character of such examinations so that they become intellectual experiences instead of more tests of memory and repetition of lectures. While Harvard has seen significant advances in the professional schools and great expansion during this period. President Lowell's great contribution has undoubtedly been in tais general levelling up of the undergraduate's intellectual opportunities. It is a twenty-year period that will become notable in Harvard's history for this basic intellectual betterment. Yale men will join with their Harvard friends in the felicities of the occasion. Yale Alumni Weekly.