HARVARD HALL MATHEMATICS

For years the authorities have known that means of exit from Harvard Hall are utterly in adequate for the number of students during the morning classes. It takes anywhere from one to seven minutes to get out of the building after a class, depending on whether the student is on the first floor near the door, or on the top floor farthest away from the door.

It takes the average man four minutes to get into a class, and four minutes to get out of it, due to a four-foot narrow stairway that allows passage for but one man at a time each way up and down. Eight minutes out of every hour are therefore spent moving an absurdly short distance of some twenty or thirty fect in a congestion comparable only to a New York subway station in a rush hour.

Now for five hundred students to spend eight minutes thus amounts to four thousand minutes wasted out of every hour; there are four morning hour classes, and four times four thousand is sixteen thousand minutes wasted a day; there are a minimum of one hundred class days a year, which gives one million six hundred minutes a year wasted by men with classes in Harvard Hall.

That is, three full years wasted. In three years, working the twenty four hours a day that is figured on, Shakespere could have finished ten plays, Vergil, Milton and Homer could have written three or four more epics apiece, and Alexander and Napoleon could have conquered all existing worlds and still have had time to lay plans for expeditions to conquer Mars. But the authorities of the richest university in the country must economise on a flight of stairs!

O Economy, what evils are committed in thy name!