MARKED MONEY

The refusal of the University to comply with the conditions made by the Civil Works Administration may seem, at first glance, ungracious and arbitrary. There is, of course, a strong presumption in favor of any plan to assist students at a time when their budgetary strain is more acute than ever before, but this should not prevent an understanding of the University's decision, and of the considerations by which it was dictated.

Harvard has, through the Students' Employment Office, the Loan Funds, and the Emergency Employment Fund, made its own adjustment to the problems of the needy undergraduate. The adjustment is a special one, made for a student body unlike those of the majority of American colleges. It is a student body whose depression problems can be solved, not by an arbitrary fifteen dollars a month, such as the CWA gift would prescribe, but by a coordination of loans, scholarships, and employment, made to individuals after a personal examination of their requirements. A college whose minimum expenses are twelve hundred dollars a year does not possess many men to whom fifteen dollars a month spells the decisive difference, and the CWA funds could not have been efficiently administered unless Harvard's agencies, coordinated for the same purpose as that served by the CWA fund, were given a free hand in their disbursement.

This concession the CWA was unwilling to make, although many other donors in times less trying than these have made them. It is unfortunate that a satisfactory compromise could not have been struck between the government's desire to restrict its grant to students otherwise unable to remain in college and the University's desire to administer its own undergraduate aid. But Harvard's demand was made on the basis of a highly satisfactory record in meeting its special problems; the demand of the CWA, on the other hand, was largely a failure to recognize that the most general law must have its legitimate exceptions.