THE HINDMARSH REPORT

In today's issue the CRIMSON publishes a statement by Mr. Hindmarsh on the problems of scholarship and student finance. His central suggestion, that the various agencies for distributing money to the undergraduates should be united under one permanent official, is surely one to which no large objection can be raised, and for which many important arguments can be advanced. The chiefest of them has been adduced by Mr. Hindmarsh; a single office would be able to treat the problem of each individual more completely, to tell him more definitely than any office can tell him now what his prospects for assistance are.

But an office of this kind would be valuable not only as a solvent of inter-departmental red tape; it might be able to face the persistent problems of student aid with the continuity and courage that they demand. The emergency student employment, for example, has tended to become more literal minded than is necessary. Some of the jobs which have burgeoned under its hand, such as the museum bone dusting, have only a nominal utility; others, such as the library label sticking, occupy so much time as to militate against the fact that Harvard is, after all, a college, and that its student body had best conserve their energies to the acquisition of knowledge. The emergency employment appropriation could be diverted to gifts and loans to needy applicants after the really useful and suitable work had been distributed; those whose budgets required assistance beyond their share of the appropriation, and who were securing it by employment elsewhere, might well be relieved of the extended tedium of the emergency jobs.

Another, and more general problem, is the weighting which tutorial work should have in the scholarship grants. The tutorial reports now submitted are largely blanket recommendations, with an occasional blanket vote. Unless the tutorial work were rigidly graded, and this is for obvious reasons undesirable, the tutor is unwilling to assume the responsibility of affecting any man's chance to return to college by a comparative judgment, even if he were prepared to make one. The CRIMSON is inclined to the belief that this weighting cannot come to be important until the tutorial system is allowed to assume its destined dominance over the course system; and until yearly examinations and rank lists are constructed on this new basis. But even with the present course emphasis, a single agency could deal with the problem more competently, and could eliminate much of the injustice which must exist when scholarships are awarded without an intimate financial knowledge of each applicant. For the relations of the university with the needy student could not fail to be improved by the information facilities which a single filing system would make possible.