LIQUOR IN DINING HALLS

The average undergraduate will not be surprised at the content of President Conant's dictum on the liquor situation in House dining halls. This much may be startling,--that the president has seen fit to address the undergraduate body directly on a matter of this sort; for in the past it has been the custom to hand over such rulings tacitly to underlings, to have them unobtrusively enforced, to make them "generally understood." But the prohibition itself is in the best of University Hall form. It is conservative, sober, and unexplained. To obviate confusion, the President has ruled that no undergraduate may bring liquor into the dining halls. That is all, and for officialdom, that is enough.

The student, however, will feel that it is not quite enough. He is likely to look behind the surface of this curt manifesto and to find there nothing but timidity. If it is a legal tangle that University Hall fears, then let it look to the law, and discover that there is nothing in it to prohibit the sort of thing in question. If, as is very likely, University Hall is clinging to tradition in the fear that dining hall decorum will be upset by the entrance of liquor, and in the fear that the name of Harvard University will thereby gather no grace, let it consider these ancient, yet nonetheless staring facts:

The "tradition" that no liquor was to be served or drunk in college dining halls grew up under two conditions which have radically changed today. It grew up at a time when there was no such thing as college dining, as Harvard knows it today; at a time which may be characterized as the Memorial-Hall-long-table-biscuit-throwing era. What is more, the generations which it oversaw had not, for the most part, discovered that intemperance is next to godliness, and that grain alcohol is much cheaper, yea, and more effective than wines. Perhaps today's undergraduate would carry his dypsomania with him into the dining halls. A great many sensible people feel that he would not, that encouraging the use of wine and beers in the dining halls would, as it were, short-circuit his craving for stouter stuff, and that the comparative austerity of the Houses would prevent unseemliness.

Perhaps University Hall assumes that this is a passing matter, that soon all will be forgotten, and that "tradition" has indicated an easy exit from a dangerous situation. This is a blind, one is tempted to say, a child's argument. The day will come when light wines and beer will be served in the dining halls. It will be a long time coming, it will require changes in the state laws and in the University's attitude, but it will come; it will be dictated by the kind of club dining which students have been led to expect in the Houses. Until that happy day, the University may follow one of two roads. It may lag behind, play safe, and cling to its 'scutcheen. Or it may take the lead in teaching its students temperance by allowing them to indulge in quiet, legal drinking with their meals. One is inclined to hope that yesterday's manifesto will not commit the University to the former path.