Fantasia in D Minus

Something about the presence of Harry Pulham in Harvard Square over the weekend raised in our mind the question of the Twenty-Fifth Reunion of the Class of '42. After worrying for a few hours about whether there would be any of the Class left in 1967 we settled down to the less morbid pursuit of guessing what Harvard will be like when that day comes around.

We are confident that the Widener Reading Room will still smell the same, but it won't matter. There won't be any reading in books. All the tomes will have been made over into microfilm reels, and cramming will be as good as going to the movies. After having filled up the open space between Widener and the Memorial Chapel with new library buildings, the College will have decided to burrow underground for excess storage space, and Weld will have collapsed into the Indic Philology and Semantics wing of the basement. Students will still learn in their Junior year that Widener is closed on Sundays.

The Wellesley campus will come in handy as a sort of summer picnic ground, for the University will be open all year round, night and day. Students will undoubtedly graduate in a year and three-quarters by that time, and some form of relaxation other than sitting in Widener avatching Radcliffe girls ankles will be necessary. Freshmen will be admitted after a year and a half of secondary 'school and marbles will become a 'Varsity sport.

Lectures will be held once a week and the Faculty will make every effort to get up from Washington to give them.

The Administration will have become cramped in its quarters in Massachusetts and will have spread to Hollis, Stoughton, Holworthy and Wigglesworth.

The University will still have a Placement Office, the descendant of the temporary one set up during the War. Even if there is no more V-7 in those far-off days, it is certain that by that time Professor Casner will have discovered some other constructive line of endeavor to suggest to all applicants.

Princeton and Harvard will have an annual football game for the championship of the Big Three.

If the Romanoff regime has been reinstituted in Russia by that time, the Student Union will come out for an American czar. The Liberal Union will still be in favor of all sorts of nice things.

Among fields intellectual the Fine Arts Department will be the most enlarged. Inspired by its wartime camouflage course with the thrill of being practical, the denizens of the art galleries will have emerged from their Fogg to give courses on color schemes in mixing chemicals, geological perspective, sketching of microbes, and the art of aerial photography.

The English Department will have decided that F. Scott Fitzgerald is far enough in the past to have theses written about him. History and Literature professors will speak of the strain of mysticism running from John Donne through T. S. Eliot to A. A. Milne and the Freudian significance of Terry and the Pirates. Members of the History Department will still be fired for speaking to members of the Sociology Department and vice versa, and the Economics Department will have crected a statue to J. M. Keynes in front of Holyoke House.

Undergraduates in the Houses will live in fourdecker beds, and the House dining rooms will be gigantic automats. An eighth House will have been constructed by grouping together all the rat houses and certain other buildings on Mt. Auburn Street.

One last stronghold of the Harvard of 1942 will remain, to all appearances unchanged. Yes, externally the same, the Lampoon Building will still exist, heedless of the swirling currents of humanity that pass and crash at its corner. But inside its three walls things will be different, for after having served the functional purpose of an airraid shelter during the War, the Lampoon will have been turned over to the Boston Elevated Railway as a subway station.