Parietal Misrule

Tonight at seven o'clock undergraduates will uproot themselves and their female guests and leave the Houses for the great outdoors. These men, deprived by the College of any place in which to entertain, are pushed into Boston's public night spots and theatres when they might normally choose to pass the evening in the relative comfort and sanctity of their rooms. It is a sadly warped social life that can include no private parties and that leaves a man idling away his after-theatre hour in a noisy cocktail lounge instead of in the easy talk and companionship that can come only with familiar, personalized surroundings.

Colleges throughout the nation have recognized this problem and for the most part have met it squarely. Where there are fraternities--and this includes most schools--women may usually be entertained in the Greek lettered houses until midnight or one o'clock, A survey of Ivy League colleges shows that where strict parietal rules exist for fraternities, deans have seen fit not to enforce them. Other schools have Student Union buildings which provide undergraduates a place in which to talk, and dance, away from the bustle of headwaiters and local citizenry out for a noisy fling.

Harvard College has no recreation building, and it has no fraternities. Its deans realize that a serious social problem exists, but they are unwilling to turn to the Houses to solve it. They feel that our society just does not permit women to be entertained in gentlemen's rooms. To let down the bars, they argue, would offend too many people. They feel it is their duty to the community to arrange that women not be seen entering the Houses at night, and that is their duty to the students to teach them the mores of our society. They feel, in addition, that they owe it to the University not to jeopardize Harvard's name by an action they believe would violate the moral code of the community.

Are these taboos real enough and important enough to justify distortion of the normal social life of the student? The University itself has answered this question in two clearly-cut cases. In the graduate schools, students are permitted to entertain women in their rooms until midnight. And in the hallowed Houses themselves, the parietal bars have been let down for tutors and entry proctors.

In these rulings, the University has acknowledged that proctors, tutors, and graduate students alike have only one place where they may entertain and relax--their quarters. It has judged the social life of these men to be more important than the puritanical mores of out society, more important than the jittery nerves of mothers of local college girls, and more important than whatever publicity might--but almost never does--result in the scandal-hungry Boston press. It has also judged that the social life of undergraduates is not equally important.

The deans of the College, over whose desks the undergraduate's social problems must pass, have themselves repudiated this double standard. They admit that the parietal rules should not be set up on this basis of age. Yet they continue to treat these rules as something sacrosanct, and the harried undergraduate has learned to regard them as immutable law. The deans have only to look about them at their brother New England colleges and at the graduate schools of their own University to discover that their problem has a solution. If social life at Harvard is to be a normal life, the dean's office will have to reexamine its gospel and open the Houses to evening entertainment.