LANDING ON LANDIS

Now that Mr. Walter Lippmann has started sniping at Dean Landis in his syndicated column for the Herald-Tribune, and Mr. George G. Zabriskic has crystallized in his recent letter to the Alumni Bulletin a good deal of conservative Harvard resentment toward some of the recent utterances of the Dean-designate, the question "Is Landis really the man?" needs a bit of public airing. For to many who were profoundly pleased at the selection of Mr. Landis a few months ago, on the basis of his brilliant legal thinking and his diplomatic handling of the S.E.C., it comes as distinct shock that the new Dean of the Law School has shown doubts about the illegality of the sit-down strike and has come out in favor of the Supreme Court change.

Now, the question of Mr. Landis's fitness to be Dean has nothing to do with what he thinks about sit-down strikes or the packing of the Court. Those of Harvard's State Street graduates who took de light in snubbing the Dean on the occasion of a recent dinner at the Harvard Club in Boston were just as ill-mannered in the conservative view-point as they accuse the Dean of being "ill-tempered and unlawyerlike" in the other direction. The dean's immediate political thoughts can hardly be said to have anything to do with the case.

But the opposition stands on much firmer ground when it comes out to attack Mr. Landis's "legal temperament". For it is an inescapable fact that all of the Dean's legal training has been in the theoretical side of the law or in administration. As a lawyer in the practical sense, or at least the sense that has been understood for generations, he has had little experience, no matter how high he may rank in the development and teaching of legal thought. Thus, in all fairness to the man and to the University to which he is to give his services, one can ask "Is he fitted to teach and to direct the teaching of lawyers?" For Harvard, besides its function as a laboratory for new thought and a reservoir for the preservation of old, ought also to be a training school in the practice of law by young men.

The answer to the question of Mr. Landis's fitness cannot be fairly determined in advance, and Harvard, having made the selection, certainly owes it to its self to go through with it. But the outburst of strong and heartfelt opposition that has been shaking the Harvard legal world in the past few weeks should not go unheeded by the Dean. It is a sign for him to stop barnstorming about the country like a "Congressional rabble-rouser" issuing statements on strikes and the Supreme Court. It is time for the Dean to begin to think about the administrative problems that will call for his best efforts in September, and to give up the pleasure and excitement that he takes in the fray of present day politics.