BLAZING THE TRAIL

The young Council of Government Concentrators is a living suggestion to every other department in the college. Its aim is to build up a student organization which will be a clearing house for all ideas, theories discussions, experiences, and criticism of Government, particularly Harvard's Government Department. The Council was first organized last spring, and it has quietly worked its way to the point where a hundred odd men attended last night's panel discussion. At that rate of growth, the Council will soon become a powerful, constructive force in the Government Department--a force which is conspicuously lacking in many other fields.

Classroom contacts, the tutorial system, and the limp, faculty-inspired gatherings are starvation rations for the man who is really interested in his subject. Men who want to make a career out of their field of concentration and men who are not satisfied with the regular routine of assignments need an organization similar to the Council of Government Concentrators. In these panel discussions the big men of the department carry on a sort of free debate on various topics of general interest, concerning either college affairs or national and international problems. These meetings have immense potentialities, particularly the development of a strongly independent forum which could give invaluable suggestions to course and department heads. Why should not all undergraduate grievances, real or fancied, by frankly aired before those whose business it is to remedy department faults, rather than allowed to spread surrepticiously about the college, subject to falsification and embroidery at every turn?

The Council of Government Concentrators indicates that it is well on the way to success. Students in other fields, particularly in the order social sciences, would do well to follow the Council's example. While the instructors must be willing to cooperate, it is important that the actual impetus come from the men themselves. Inerested and critical student organizations in every field of concentration would go a long way toward stimulating that absorption of interest of the individual student in his subject matter which is the very lifeblood of a university.