Share the Wealth

When the Summer term begins in July, great teachers will find themselves lecturing to about eight hundred students in accomodations for a peace time three thousand, five hundred. At the same time service men on leave in Boston, many of them fresh from college classrooms, will find themselves footloose and fancy free, hungry for something besides bars and burlesque. These two problems could be partially resolved if the University would agree to open its almost sacrosanct classroom doors to a limited number of soldiers and sailors.

One does not have to go far to find the proper method for handling the problem of admission limitations. The established USO agencies in Boston, which take care of other tickets for service-men, could also issue tickets for specific classes here. In this way, each man could be limited as to the number of classes he might attend and no class would have more visitors than it could easily accomodate in unused seats. Nor would the fact that lectures are pointed at men who have previous knowledge of the context necessarily hamper the success of the plan. Experience with the Nieman fellows and other graduate students, chronic samplers of Harvard teaching, has shown that no professor has to alter his lecture or make any introductory remarks before addressing an interested outsider.

Obviously, no uninterested servicemen would apply, and those that grasp the opportunity would have a memorable morning browsing around in Harvard's teachings. And while the browser is benefitting himself there are many classes, especially in History, Government, and Philosophy, where the greater breadth of the auditor's experience might add substantially to what the students themselves get out of the class.

Harvard, while it is contributing a great deal directly to the war effort in the service schools, could increase its contribution even further in this indirect way--helping to keep alive the vestiges of the humanities and giving necessarily regimented thought a chance to free itself, if only for a morning.