"Ten Censure Wrong"

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld).

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Your assertion about the new oral examinations in History and Literature in today's CRIMSON to the effect that "wide spread opposition to the plan is being formed by concentrators" in the field is false. If there is any opposition worthy of consideration, it must be founded on more authentic information and on more mature and valid arguments than those which you published.

Your news story was merely erroneous; your editorial was malicious. There are, no doubt, reasonable objections to the new plan for oral examinations. But the statement that it is a plan of the "shrinking violets among the faculty" to replace "petty inferiority complexes" with "true professorial pomposity" itself "smacks of the bull-ring" more than of the editorial column. To attack the plan by calling the originators of it names is a confession of the writer's own inability to think of any better arguments. To call it "boot-licking" simply because it is a system which has been used at Oxford and Cambridge is arguments by epithet.

You cannot improve education at Harvard, if that is your aim, by making petty attacks on the personalities, evidently unknown to you, of departmental executives. D. J. Boorstin '34.   R. B. Schlatter '34.