PRICE LAUDS HOUSE PLAN AND NEW BUILDINGS IN CURRENT BULLETIN ISSUE

The following article by Luclen Price '07, is a printed through the courtesy of the Alumni Bulletin.

"'Then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair' sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything." Plato: Republic, 401.

September smelts its autumnal ore in skies of glowing gold. The cicada shrills, a drowsy not steals into the crickets' chime, elm leaves rust toward the pensive melancholy of their yellowing. Such rites of the year's decay are reminders of the academic year's renewal. It is time to go back to school, and this week six hundred lucky Harvard undergraduates, having returned to their studies, live in two of the most stately new schoolhouses over built in America, houses so beautiful one would think that after having once lived in them the rest of life would be exile. They have cost millions, and millions are to be spent. Why this lavish outlay in college already richly endowed. It is in the hope contriving and intellectual climate ever more friendly to that mysterious ferment which here and there causes to rise in some human breast the yeast of a creative life-purpose.

In the Old Days

Mysterious this ferment surely is. A spring is not securely basined in marble, it may bubble through the neighboring turf; and spiritual ferment is often generated by studies quite outside college courses. A man in the Harvard class of 1908, who later distinguished himself, once told me that on a November day, when the Yale game was being played in New Heaven, he sat in a leather armchair beside a fire of logs in the library of the Union, from after breakfast until dusk, reading Tolstoy's "War and Peace." Autumn loured in cloudy skies and mourned in the gusty wind, steps scffed along the board-walks, football songs were whistled, the oak door slammed; it all sounded as from a dream. He was living in a remote heroic world. That was the days when-the intellectual passion was kindled in him, when he promised himself that he would be somebody. He kept his word. It is in the silent places that such resolutions are taken, and there, too, the decisive battles are lost or won.

Before these fortunate young men move in, let us inspect their new abodes whilst we can still do so without infringing privacy, and the better to understand what we are seeing let us look also into Harvard's House Plan, which begins this month.

Eights Slice of College

Cut a loaf of bread into eight slices. Lay one slice flat, and on it set the other seven upright. That loaf is the total of college undergraduates. The horizontal slice is the freshman class; the seven vertical slices are the residents of the seven Houses. Two of the new House Plan buildings, Dunster House and Lowell House, are ready for use; a third, Eliot House, are ready for use; a third, Eliot House, is begun. In each of the two finished Houses about 300 men, from the sophomore, junior, and senior classes, begin study this week. This year the freshmen remain in the group of dormitories built for them beside the Charles. Next year's freshman class will be housed in the yard, and the present Freshman Dormitiories will be converted into three House Plan units; Smith Halls for one, Gore and Standish Halls for another, and McKinlock, with additions still to be built, for a third. Eliot House, now being built on the site of the demolished power plaut at the corner of Memorial Drive and Boylston St., fronting the river (and to be finished by next autumn), will be a fourth unit, and three older dormitories of the Mt. Auburn St. region. Randolph and Russell Halls, with Westmorly Court, will be a fifth, making in all seven Houses. One more new dormitory will be built in the Yard for the Freshmen. It will stand in the space bounded by Massachusetts Ave, on the south, Wardsworth House on the west. Grays Hall and the Widener Library on the north, and Professor Palmer's residence on the east. Thus each year's freshman class will be kept a unit in the Yard, af-

ter which, for their remaining three undergraduate year, they will be apportioned among the seven Houses.

This year's resident in Dunster and Lowell Houses have been chosen by House Master and tutors with a view to each House having a typical slice from the human layer-cake of the College. Certain tutors will live in the Houses, others will have conference rooms in them and live elsewhere, but every student-in a given House will have at least on resident tutor. These methods are admittedly experimental. It is hoped that each House will in time develop an individuality and attract students by their major interests.

Dining Halls Good

The desertion of the big-dining halls for cafeterias has been a social disintegration of the College during the past decade and a half. The House Plan meets this with slightly dining halls and promise of excellent food. It also meets the situation with a little Marxian economic determinism. All student members of the House will be charged a minimum rate of $8.50 a week for meals. This will entitle them to any 14 meals they choose. Additional meals will be paid for at the rate of 30 and 40 cents for breakfast, 60 cents for lunch, and 80 cents for dinner. For the student who takes his 21 meals in the House the charge will be $10.50 per week. The waiters will not be students.

What, for the present, are the main differences to be expected under the House Plan? Undergraduates of the three upper classes will be grouped by Houses. Living and eating in the same building, they will see more of their tutors and of one another, and there can be more intermingling of under and upper-classmen. Athletics will become more inter-house and less inter-class, although the University athletic contests will go on as usual. Resident tutors will not be proctors. In fact, there will be no proctors in the Houses. To make resident tutors disciplinary officers would scarcely promote that easy and familiar intercourse between student and tutor which the House Plan is designed to institute. The tables in the dining halls will seat from two to eight persons, where one sits being it matter of choice. Another innovation will be the greater frequency of evening conferences between students and tutors.

What of Clubs?

What will become of the undergraduate clubs? The older ones which sink their roots into the social loam and financial subsoil of the surrounding community, academic Cantabrigian and urbane Bostonese, will no doubt go on much as usual, at least for the present.

Let us now follow a student resident in one of the Houses through his day's routine. He wakes on the narrow iron bedstead of his private chamber in one of those delightful little suites, bathes under the shower in the bathroom which he shares with his roommate if the suite is double. He can dress besides an open fire in his study (though all the rooms are steam heated) and if the weather is stormy he can, by descending into the basement, walk to the dining hall from any room in the House without going out of doors. He may breakfast at a table by himself of choose table companions from men of three classes, with perhaps at tutor. His lectures, between 9 A. M. and 4 P. M., will be mostly up in the yard or in the halls north of it, as previously. His tutorial reading can be done either in the Widener Library or in the special library of his House. His afternoon exercise can be taken Holyoke St. from Lowell House or at Soldiers Field, or on the river. Although lie can dine where he chooses, one look at those magnificent dining halls in Dunster House and Lowell House incline one to expect that the will choose rather the dinner of herbs in the stateliness of their proffering than the stalled ox of the cafeterias. At periods during the day and evening will come conferences with his tutors, singly or in group. These are, of course, at the tutor's rooms in the House. Here is one of the departures. Instead of being unremittingly lectured at 80 many hours a week, and left largely to his own devices till time to spill these lectures back into the pages of an examination book, he will be sitting beside his tutor's hearth, both of them, the chances are, smoking if they care to, whilst discussing, reciting, quizzing, and being quizzed. This, as anyone who has triecrat knows, can mean a lively and often stimulating session of an hour's or even three or four hours' duration, a conversational give-and-take which stirs up the mind as few lecturers are able to do. And at his day's end he goes back to his study and bedchamber in an entry where his fellow students may be men from any or all three of the upper College classes, and perhaps one or more of his tutors, all presumably good neighbour who can be dropped in on at reasonable hours. This is a palace revolution from the bad old days when undergraduatos were abandoned to miscellaneous College or private domormitories and nondescript houses, even three-decker wooden tenements, eating at one-armed lunches, seeking only little sets of personal acquaintances, often very narrow ones, and tutors except professionally or at a starched reception. Such were the conditions which prompted Professor George Pierce Baker to observe with praiseworthy candor one Easter recess, when a party of us were joiting up to Chocorua in the most accomodating of all accommodation trains: "Parents suppose when they send their boys to Harvard that they are sending them to college. What they are really doing is sending them out into the world." The chill isolation of coming to a big college unknown and unfriended and remaining almost so (a thing that has been known to happen at Harvard) is virtually eliminated by the House Plan.

Charlesbank Harvard is already an Olympia. In Europe you are shown plenty of places not half as magnificent. And of course a year hence, when Eliot House dominates the vista, it will be still more impressive. Of Lowell House only the tower is seen from the river, but what that House loses in water view it gains in privacy and quiet. And the tower itself! What happy stroke of artistry decreed its color scheme? See it for the first time on a summer's day of blithe blue air, with white clouds flying, and you will think it a bit of sky caught by the wings and pinioned up aloft there white of cloud, blue of heaven, and gold of the gun. Hellenic, too; for these are the colors which everywhere in Greece fill the eye and flood the mind.

The azure skies, the golden sun

That shone on Troy and Marathon.

Everyone who frequents college towns must have been amused at the struggles of professors to turn a "realtor's" creation, into a scholar's dwelling. There will be no such trouble in the House Master's residences. Their exteriors are those of a brick colonial mansion, their interiors are academic professorial. Built into the body of the House and connected with it, each is nevertheless easily distinguishable from the mass of the building by its residential aspect and can be lived in without going into the students' or tutors' quarters. For the privilege of living in either of the House Masters' residences many a scholar would be sorely tempted to sign away his soul in the Black Man's Book. Imagine having for your study a room finished in dark oak panelling, cupboards thigh high, and book shelves on up to the ceiling, with chimneypiece to match-all flooded with sunshine from the spacious are of a bow window. The House Master's residence at Dunster fronts the river. In Lowell House the Master is not so lucky, but the architects have consoled him most successfully with a brick-walled garden close, its lawn shaded by two elms and a buckeye tree, and descended to by a short flight of iron-railed stond steps from French windows opening out of the living room and dining room bays. Even in its present unflowered-gardened state the place is a stage setting ready for the actors to come on and speak their lines. These lines are from "Pendennis." You will remember that exquisite comedy scene in which Dr. Portman espies from the Dean's garden through an open window the hapless Pen in the act of proposing to the Fotheringay! Here it is, at Lowell House and in Thackeray:

"It happened that the Dean of Chatteris entertained a few select clerical friends at his deanery house. That they drank uncommonly good port wine, and abused the Bishop over their dessert are very likely matters, but with such we have nothing at present to do. Our friend, Dr. Portman of