Mater Advocata

With both the Crimson and the Lampoon back to a pre-war basis, the most notable lack in the field of undergraduate publications continues to be the Advocate. Although many difficulties have attended the efforts of the mother of all Harvard publications to resume operation, her continued absence, a year and a half after the end of the war, is inexcusable and a disgrace to those responsible.

Throughout the spring and summer terms of last year the absence of the Advocate was explained away on the grounds that not enough Advocate editors had returned to College, that their building had been rented out over the editors' heads, and that the magazine had ceased operations in 1943 considerably in debt. Whether or not these reasons were real or imagined, there is no cause for their continued existence. There are many men in the College today eager to work on a literary magazine, just as there are at countless colleges throughout the country, many of which are smaller than Harvard. The building space in the Advocate building is now available and certainly the paying of any debt incurred by the pre-war Advocate could mean no more than a slight reduction in the income taxes of the magazine's trustees.

For a period of months the Dean's Office has quietly prodded both the trustees and ex-editors of the magazine still in College in a vain attempt to start the ball rolling. The Crimson and the Lampoon have offered to help the magazine to its feet once again in any way possible, and at least one group in the University deferred indefinitely a projected magazine of its own when the news was announced that the Advocate was to be resumed "shortly." Still the exasperating void remains--in the face of the most favorable possible situation in both the advertising and circulation fields.

The Advocate has been a Harvard institution since 1866, and yet at the very time when it can be presumed that the potential of undergraduate creative expression is at an all-time high, it remains merely a fading memory. With the College almost doubled in size and with the age level three to five years higher than before the war, the number of men with something to say has never been greater. Yet for these men these has been never been no vehicle of expression, hasn't been for twelve months and, in the absence of any definite statement from the trustees, there promises to be none in the foreseeable future. Only imagination and prompt action by those who control the magazine can catch the thought and feeling of a very different and exciting Harvard before it levels off to "normaley."