MILLION-DOLLAR IDEAS

In reading over President Conant's report, no one could fail to be impressed by the number and variety of ideas put forth and carried through in the first years of his administration. National Scholarships, Roving Professorships, Tercentenary Funds, Scholarships for Graduate Schools, the remodelling of the Dental School, the Graduate School for Public Administration, and the Athletic Endowment program pass in dazzling succession through our minds. All these plans of change and addition shine with a resplendent virtue; all are desirable, even necessary, reforms. But they all likewise have one thing in common: they require money, and more money, and still more money.

Of course there is no better time than the occasion of a Tercentenary to procure money. Already two million dollars have rolled in for the Graduate School of Public Administration, five hundred thousand for a Roving Professorship, twenty-five thousand for a National Scholarship. So we do not for a minute take exception even to the cost of these splendid ideas.

Neither has President Conant completely forgotten the internal, costless readjustments. We have had a reduction in hour examinations, attendance taking, a relaxation of requirements of distribution, suggestions of future reform of the A.B. and B.S. degrees, and of the coming of a more rounded degree for prospective teachers. Our President has proved himself a great one on very hand.

But the trend of the future will have to be far more in the line of the second type of progress than the first. Instead of inventing new scholarships, new professorships, new graduate schools, Harvard will have to get on with its paltry hundred millions, try to make its expenditure more efficient and more valuable. Million dollar ideas require millions of dollars, and if President Conant's prediction concerning the "static" period which lies ahead of us comes true, this money won't be rolling in in the manner to which Harvard has become accustomed.

So we suggest that, as an obvious first move, the Tutorial System be overhauled. The cost of our suggested reform would be zero, the return, from the point of view of the general undergraduate body, a hundred times as great as all the University Professorships and National Scholarships in the world.