As You Like It

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

In your editorial released in today's CRIMSON and entitled, "Towards a New Harvard," you have admirably stated in summary the words and purposes of President Conant as outlined in his recent report; but you have in some aspects missed the point in your appreciation of what the President intends to do. President Conant has masterfully combined the ideals of former President Lowell with those of so-called Progressive Education, and by so doing he has saved Harvard from the dismal abyss of mediocrity into which it might have fallen. He is about to inaugurate at Harvard a policy which will eventually distinguish it from its neighbors, and he is at least courageous enough to imply that those who do not possess the talent, or are not in sympathy with his ideals and policy, can go elsewhere. And even the most patriotic of Harvard men would admit, (perhaps on second thought), that there are other universities.

There can be no doubt that the educational ideals of President Conant and former President Lowell are diametrically opposed. Dr. Lowell sought, by means of the House Plan and the Tutorial System, to broaden the knowledge and experience of those who were to be the leaders of society; President Conant, on the other hand, seems to believe that only those who are allowed to broaden their own interests with a free rein will or should become the leaders of society. The distinction lies not in the method, but in the principle.

In the College--which should not be distinguished from the University, inasmuch as it should be the preparatory and proving grounds for the Graduate Schools--he will concern himself only with the encouragement of creative thought, and it is perhaps almost too obvious to call attention to the change that this will bring about in the face of the University as a whole. There will no longer be those who enjoy a scholarship at Harvard on the strength of ability to get A's: the upper seventh of the student-body will consist--as will the faculty to an even larger degree--of a group of original thinkers, the balance of those attracted by the principles and glamer of the former, and the rest of us can go elsewhere.

Entirely leaving out the financial aspect, it is a gigantic undertaking, worthy, in size and progressiveness, of a Lowell or an Eliot--in fact, one might say now, of a Conant! Creighton Churchill '36.