SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS

A Senior writing a thesis for honors, or pursuing a strictly graduate course, is given the privilege of access to the stacks in Widener. To avail himself of this he must obtain a certificate from his tutor, or from the professor in charge of the course, and present this certificate to the Superintendent of Circulation, who grants the permit for a limited time or number of visits.

The Widener authorities, before granting the permit, never fail to deliver a long and tiresome address to the applicant on the great nuisance of tolerating undergraduates in the stacks at all. The general theme is that every additional person in there is another source of disorder, that library stacks were never intended to be open to any but "trained" men, such as faculty and graduate students, that lights are always being left on and that books are wrongly shelved. The tirade generally ends with the stupidly irrelevant observation that similar privileges in the British Museum or the Bibliotheque Nationale would be unthinkable.

If the Widener authorities have any complaints on the score of undergraduates in the stacks they should carry their complaints to faculty members who prescribe work that makes such access necessary. It is silly in the extreme to deliver these tiresome orations to seniors who have no possible interest in the general subject of the desirability of allowing anyone into the stacks, but are interested only in the fact that the work given them is predicated upon the availability of such access. The comparatively few undergraduates who are writing theses or pursuing graduate courses in the humanities compare more than favorably in maturity and common sense with many of the graduate students seen in the stacks; and to imply that these picked seniors are any less "trained" in library usage than a first-year graduate student from a miniscule country college is ridiculous.

The College booklets on concentration and distribution strongly urge candidates for distinction in the various fields to elect at least one course "primarily for Graduates." If this is meant seriously, it should be called to the attention of the stack authorities, with a view to removing one of the reasons why Widener and its temperamental staff is a major irritant to a capable undergraduate trying to do the little advanced work that the teaching authorities urge him toward.