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8 Takeaways From Harvard’s Task Force Reports

HEADS UP, 1927

NO WRITER ATTRIBUTED

A popular thing these days is the filling out of questionnaires. Harvard undergraduates gave their usual horse laugh recently when Princeton '37 came through with the customary poll for Most Handsome and Did Most for Princeton. Now, however the business strikes closer home. Harvard's Class of 1927 in its Decennial Report has just made out and published a questionnaire of sixty-nine not particularly significant queries. One member has made a digest and written an article, "Was It Worth White?" which he probably thinks a good sequel to Mr. Tunis's masterpiece.

The question of the worth of a Harvard education is readily answerable. But it is doubtful whether the questionnaire is, or the article. In the first place, there is little indication on the query that one wishes most to hear about. What happened to these fortunate men who graduated and settled down just before the Crash? In the second place, when any group of men in their early thirties stand up and say they came to college for "mediocre reasons," lived "mediocre, mildly pleasant lives," and got "mediocre jobs," that group may indeed have the right to be mediocre, but it has no business thus inferring that Harvard itself lies in the same class.

The man who returned his questionnaire blank except for the cryptic remark that he was ashamed to be associated with a class which distributed such "stuff" remains the hero of the piece. Questionnaires are harmless articles, fun to fill out. They only become dangerous instruments when taken too seriously.

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