"DADDY, YOU'RE WONDERFUL!"

This year's senior received last week a unique phenomenon, an album which had replaced the usually ghastly attempts at facetious reminiscence with a serious interpretation of the past four years. The senior is glad to see this, glad the editors have escaped the rut of ordinary albums, or alba.

But when he settles down to read this commentary on Harvard life--entitled, incidentally, "Out of the Bellglass"--he may be a little startled. For he will see what attempts to be a portrait of himself and what is indeed a caricature at best, an effigy at worst.

The senior is a superman, or so he will read. He has never walked alone along the Charles, never indulged in bull sessions. He has banished the club man, the "C man" from Harvard. He is not the self-indulgent romantic his elder brother was; he is a social realist. Above all he is never indifferent and he thinks of himself only in terms of society as a whole. He is a socialist's dream-child. He bears a striking affinity to the authors of the article their hearts cross the left place.

The senior, while rejoicing at any original note in the Album, may wonder if he has been painted from life, if this is the kind of picture he wants bandied about by posterity.

As he will readily see, the article has a salient weakness. It implies a change in himself, rather than in the type of student who is arbitrarily admitted by the University. The authors have chosen to regard the student body as static, and the presence of Dorchester men in Phi Beta Kappa as a token of what Marx hath wrought.

Building up their argument to support a preconceived conclusion, the authors have woven various events of the past four years into an intricate pattern, and manufactured a trend. "The refugee drive, the appearance of new publications and the renaissance of the old and the increased membership of "progressive" organizations all point, the authors say, to a new undergraduate.

The Album had a good idea. But its first experiment in intellectual interpretation cannot be called a success. It is not only inaccurate; it is synthetic, unreal. The senior, taking his place beside the graduates of other years, is a marked man. He is branded as a conscious intellectual, an affected liberal. And only if the Revolution really comes, will the child of tomorrow look up from these glittering pages, wave his chubby fist in the air and cry, "Daddy, you're wonderful!"