FREEDOM--HARVARD BRAND

In the welcome extended to the Freshman Class by Thomas Nelson Perkins '91, acting head of the University in President Conant's absence, the note of freedom, so earnestly pounded during the Tercentenary, was once more dinned into the cars of undergraduates. Dean Sperry and Mr. Gummere, although starting from different points, also found themselves trying to impress upon the newest and greenest of Harvard's thousands what this vague term freedom meant to them as students.

To those who spoke an listened during the Tercentenary the term freedom had a thousand implications, but most of them were political. The speeches in the Union Friday night however concerned a slightly different kind of freedom, the liberty granted the individual by University Hall to do as he pleases. Petty regulations like chapel attendance, which, as Dean Sperry pointed out, was abolished just fifty years ago, have been cut to the minimum. In spite of the reputed difficulties of scholastic work now as against the "good old days," even Mr. Perkins was willing to admit that compliance with the bare regulations would leave all but the poorest student free spend most of his time as he chose.

The freedom to do as one pleases results in enormous waste; much that is done is misdirected, much is merely stupid, some little works ill on the community at large but even this is usually borne with tolerance. In greeting the latest addition to Harvard's ranks the spokesmen for the University were not considering these abuses of freedom. They spoke in feeling tones of the waste involved, not in doing as one pleased, but in not doing at all--in loafing through college, accomplishing nothing beyond satisfying the few requirements asked by the Dean's office at midyears and in June. They realize only too well that Harvard's proud boast of freedom must be a freedom for action, or else, long with her laboratories, libraries, and faculty, it will become utterly meaningless.