STEPPING STEINS

The University in considering the beer sales question, has hitherto preserved the open-mind policy with surpassing success. There have been pseudo-reversals of position; there have been mutterings as to the possibility of "unfavorable publicity"; finally, the buck was passed to the redoubtable Cambridge legislators. As a result, the undergraduate body has been left in a desert of thirsty suspense, while the rest of the nation may count the hours with reasonable certainty.

In order to provide the students with a means, at least, of expressing their opinion, the CRIMSON has instituted today a beer poll. The aims of this step are two-fold: it will furnish a safety valve for the harried spirits now longingly eyeing the keg; and it will demonstrate to the University the true condition of its youthful wards. The allots are so arranged as to cover all the important points of the problem, and even bring to light some of its more obscure phases. The results of the poll will not, in all probability, crown Lowell House with foam, or set its bells to tintinnabulating beerily, but they will be a step toward definition and consummation.

The implications for the future of American business which are contained in the program for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Business School are too apparent to escape notice. The speakers include a college president, a professor of Philosophy, two representatives of labor, and one each of science and politics. Nowhere in the list is there a graduate of the School, nowhere anyone who would have qualified, even in the years before 1929, as a captain of industry.

The path of the Business School during the last twenty-five years has been that of a pioneer. Unlike the other graduate schools, it did not grow up with the profession for which it trains, and thus far in its career it has been concerned with "learning about business as it exists." To its success in this task of teaching the methods and intricacies of big business, the ease with which Morgan Hall continues to find place for its graduates bears indisputable testimony.

From this time on, the role of the Business School must be a larger and a more responsible one. To study the technique of an industrial system which has shown its utter unfitness for any enlightened country, will not in the future be enough. Dean Donham, himself a leading advocate of voluntary planning, is under no delusions on this point. "The larger task ahead," he says in his latest report, "is the training of men for the kind of administrative responsibility which . . . recognized business not alone as an aggregation of specialities, or even as a unity which can be thought of in isolation apart from the social organism; but as one social force possessing its significance mainly through its relationships to the social groups in the community." Speaking of the rapid changes in our economic system, he says elsewhere, "Much of the responsibility for dealing with these changes is in the hands of business." He does not add that unless business meets this responsibility in a better way than it has in the past, the responsibility may soon be taken out of its hands and transferred to those of government.