THE GRIP OF THE PAST

The old order changes but slowly in many parts of Harvard University. The Visiting Committee appointed this year by the Board of Overseers for the Department of Economics is a case in point. Glancing down the roster of the committee, one finds the names of Wintrhop W. Aldrich, George F. Baker, Richard Whitney, and two lease moguls of the banking fraternity, together with Walter Lippmann and Walter S. Gifford. For a committee of seven members, the Overseers managed to pick one liberal columnist, one president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and five bankers.

It gives pause to wonder what sort of criticism these men bring to bear on the Department of Economics. Do they exert what influence they can toward seeing that a more or less cloistered faculty is alive to the vital economic problems of the day? Do they, in their spare moments between testifying before Senate investigating committees and issuing denunciations of the Securities Law, give a thought to the part which Harvard's Economics department ought to play in training the leaders of a new order of society? There is, perhaps, no reason to suppose that the opinions of all these men have been moulded solely by their position in life, but if ever there were assembled a committee composed of lameducks in the sense that they are pillars of a discredited order, this is that committee.

The average Overseers' Visiting Committee plays no very active part in the affairs of its department, and if this committee is typical, its influence may be mercifully passive. But a department whose most notable piece of work since the depression began was the recent pamphlet attacking the recovery program, is in need of some sort of visitation, and not the type that this committee is likely to supply.