IT'S ABOUT TIME!

The announcement from Lehman Hall this morning, inaugurating a lower range of food prices for House diners, will be welcome indeed to men who have been compelled for over a year to pay prices which averaged roughly a third higher than was warranted by depression costs. In taking this step, University officials are responding to a lengthy, justified clamor for reduction, and the notice will be gratefully received by those it affects.

But the long delay in reducing the prices still remains, to most minds, unexplained. Even when the present charges corresponded more perfectly to the prices in the wholesale market, the Dining Halls were run with sufficient profit. Though outside prices have fallen, the Administration has long persisted in its high costs long after conditions and undergraduate opinion justly demanded change.

The terms of the new rates are fair enough. Abandoning the old "maximum plan," which counted in extra meals only to the $10.50 mark, may excite some opposition, but it can be regarded as a just measure to help support the lowered rates. Whatever halo may still hover over the roof of Lehman Hall is quickly dissipated by a consideration of the means utilized literally to compel men to sign for the twenty-one meal ticket. Twenty-one meals a week will cost nine dollars; fourteen meals would be priced at $.7.75. Between the two limits one finds seven meals for $1.25, truly a seductive figure in these days, to lure men into House Dining Halls. But even this can be justified by calling to mind the "fundamental principles" of the House Plan.

All in all, the new rates and conditions are just. Undergraduates will welcome the belated lightening of their depressed budgets and feel assured that Lehman Hall will not suffer fatally from reduced returns. But the administration's obvious duty of lowering room rents should not be obscured by this latest manifestation of official awakening. Board and room are totally independent and merit separate consideration. The lowering of one cost does not preclude lowering the other. Lehman Hall must now turn its attention toward answering a similar and equally justified demand for less expensive rooms.