FLASH! HARVARD MAN HURT

When two Harvard students were injured in an automobile accident early Saturday morning returning from a North Shore debutante party, the perennial argument that Harvard boys should not be allowed to have autos was brought up anew. Although the fall season is an especially dangerous one due to the frequency of the coming-out dances, hardly a week goes by all year that some student is not injured in a serious crash.

Most of these accidents come at night; most of them occur when the students involved are coming to or from some party or social affair; and in many of the cases the driver has been drinking. This does not mean anyone in the car was drunk. Tests have conclusively proved that when you drive at night, because you are more tired, your reactions are slower. And when you add that to a couple of drinks, even if only beer, a driver will take up to three and four times as long to respond to an emergency as under normal driving conditions.

Since, apparently, students like other people will not learn their lesson and drive slower at night when they're tired, keep they're hands off the wheel when they've been drinking, the simplest way out might appear to be to keep them from driving. That's what happened at Princeton after a whole series of crashes had so shocked the Nassau authorities that they removed the student's driving permission.

But the simplest way out often proves the worst; for at Princeton the rule is flagrantly violated by boys who keep their cars in nearby towns; and if Princeton can't enforce the rule, how can Harvard, located in a big city, have an outside chance to do it? It would be impossible to keep students from putting their cars up in Boston or the suburbs, and from using the cars of friends who lived nearby and commuted into the Square.

There can be no effective way of abolishing these automobile accidents, but the number of them can be lessened if the existing motor vehicle laws were rigorously enforced. A tremendous objection would arise if all students caught driving over 50 had their license taken away or if every driver under the influence of liquor was bauled into court and fined heavily or sent to prison. But the number of accidents would be materially reduced.