FAIR AND WARMER

Last night's resolution by the Cambridge Council is milder than what one would expect from Councilman Don Quixote Sullivan and his Sancho Pansa Mr. Toomey. Perhaps those two windmill-tilters are tired after their great fight of last November when they saved the city from the dripping jaws of Harvard, or perhaps they read the article in the December Harvard Progressive on "The Case for Cambridge" and found therein food for thought. This essay directed at the ill-will that exists between Harvard and Cambridge, gathers a mass of facts on the matter and interprets them in a reasoned and thoughtful manner, though its conclusions will be much debated.

Every person interested in the public relations of the University should read the article. First it examines the old red herrings that the city suffers financial loss from Harvard, and dismisses them in a cloud of fact. It lists all the services and welfare functions the college performs for the community, many of which are not generally known. What it discovers is that "the friction between the University and the city has been caused by the fact that the two feel no common interest and are suspicious and ignorant of each other." The base of this feeling is the contrast between the mass of low-paid industrial labor in Cambridge and the wealthy and irresponsible student body This fact has not been stressed before, and certainly no account of the relations between town and gown can ignore it. But there is a long gap between the existence of such disparities of wealth and the present tenseness between the two groups. The Progressive tries to make clear this causal relation by stating that as a result of their status "a large part of the student body feel superior to and indifferent about Cambridge. He thinks its inhabitants are not only poor and ignorant but also unimportant." The townies sense and resent this attitude and hence the causa belli.

Probably the Progressive tries too hard to force the situation into the dialectic of the class war. The great masses of Cambridge may be poor, but they have no direct contact with Harvard aside from visits by the Student Union labor sympathizers, and these contacts ought to arouse just the opposite of resentment. On Harvard's side, it must be denied that a large section of the students regard the people in the way the Progressive charges. It is more probable that most of them have little opinion one way or another about the Cantabridgians save after infrequent goading by Don Quixote and his ilk. It is reasonable to believe that the tension between Harvard and its community arises from less serious reasons than class feeling and ideological cleavage. The relation between the Council's attempts to divert attention from the abnormal tax rate and the value of the University property should be studied, and the passing (it is hoped) of the current red baiting. Tact must be shown by Harvard to soothe the city, but the problem is one of public relations more than of class antagonism.