THE MAIL

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld.)

To the Editor of the Crimson:

Although Mr. Vernon Munroe has put his finger on most of the obvious faults of your program for the Tutorial System, permit me to add my protest against your sadistic inclination to more and more discipline.

It seems to me a matter of principle that when one arrives at the age and maturity of a college undergraduate there should be no childish measures to force compliance to all sorts of rules and minimum requirements and regulations limiting to freedom. A great part of the education of every student, and this of course includes your sub marginal group who could not "live up to the standards and responsibilities of the Tutorial System," is the training he gets in being on his own responsibility, in the kind of self-discipline he will have to have in after-life, and which you limit only to the tutorial students.

Furthermore, in line, I suppose, with your political views, the suggestions you make are extremely reactionary, and would reverse the presumable progress of the last 30 years toward greater and greater freedom for students, more and more of what President Lowell called "self-education", as opposed to school-boy disciplinarian-ism.

Your arguments that a student should not be allowed to waste the "expensive opportunities" of a Harvard education would apply equally well to fascistic measures regulating drinking habits, and the time students should be in bed, and what they do on week-ends. Not that the argument is illogical, but merely that it is along illiberal, fascistic lines. Perhaps requirements should be raised (although I do not think so) but certainly the methods you propose would be worse than what they are designed to remedy.

Other than this stress on discipline, the suggestions in the Crimson seem to me quite sound. Also they do not seem in the least, in other matters, to disagree with Mr. Munroe. But the return of Hour Examinations, and Quizzes, and Attendance, sends a cold shiver down my spine, and completely cclipses, for me, any value there may have been in the rest of your article. R. S. Fletcher, '35.