FOLLOW THE GLEAM

In an editorial entitled "Hot Times At Harvard" reprinted elsewhere the Johns Hopkins News Letter repeats the note often sounded by strictly conventional college papers in its statement that undergraduate journalism should limit its fields of news and editorial writing to topics which concern the college. The stand is on the whole one which the CRIMSON has always recognized as the immediate territory of an undergraduate paper.

But one major overtone in the definition of prohibition in this country is the connotation of college drinking. This fact, namely that prohibition is more closely connected with the present generation than the one now on the wane, is overlooked by the News Letter. Whatever light can be thrown on the national issue by college men in their close connection with statistics on drinking is distinctly within the precincts of college journalism.

The News Letter objects to a discussion of national questions for purely ethical reasons. In strong contradiction to this argument, it might be pointed out that, from an ethical standpoint, no newspaper, either collegiate or national, is justified in maintaining silence when it can shed vital light on important questions. The statistics which can be gathered from undergraduates on the question of drinking are vital and no other national law has worked such a constant influence among college men. Ethically, the question that should be asked is not "What can college men do about prohibition?" but, "What should college men do about prohibition?"

The News Letter makes an unnecessary apology for its reproach by stating that the CRIMSON is merely spreading the news of the Debating Council Plan. On the contrary, the CRIMSON is taking a militant attitude in an endeavor to arouse other colleges to present the many facts known only to them.

But even without the immediate facts which can be gathered in universities throughout the country, the projection of undergraduate thought beyond the sphere of the collegiate, is justified. In opposition to the policy that editorials should leave to the rest of the thinking world, matters of national concern, is the position that students who will be the nucleus of the nation's affairs ten years from now, should carry their interests into fields beyond the academic hot-house. The production of a race of scholars is the best that the former policy can hope to attain; the spreading of a more liberal principle of education and a more practical use of it in shaping the affairs of men is the be-all and end-all of the latter view. Whether or not the eagerness of the budding rulers of the nation leads them to premature and erroneous uses of power is of little consequence when questions so intimately concerned with the college generation are presented. The problems will be wholly theirs, the influence of past attempts to solve the problems is theirs now, the power to deal with present results of past reforms is theirs now. Would it be ethical, practical, modest or sensible for them to say. "We don't graduate from college for two months more" and in view of this probable development cloister themselves with half a dozen Elizabethan poets while the Senate chambers ring with the banalities of an age that has done its best and lost?