Room Service, Please

For the first time since before the war, a term will begin next February without a single new face making an appearance in Memorial Hall. After a long decline and fall, the wartime mid-year admittance system has finally found its way to the scrap heap. Although 400 Seniors will leave College for the last time, not a single Freshman or returning veteran will be on hand to replace them. It might seem that now all those long-suffering forced commuters and unHoused upperclassmen might get a chance for a room along the River. But, sad to relate, that won't be the case-at least not for the great majority of these unhappy ones.

In the first place, only 240 of the February graduates will be leaving from the Houses. And in the second place, the House Masters, conservative as always, have decided that now is the appropriate moment to retrench their room quotas to last year's level. So they have sliced 200 of the 240 February vacancies off the list, claiming that filling them again would "overcrowd" their House residents. The real value behind such a decision may be debatable-but then probably few House Masters have noticed the crowding that has been going on in Cleverly, Dudley, and other such outlying districts. Using this line of reasoning, there remain but 40 House room places to be divided up among the 200 commuters and the several hundred outcasts in the dormitories. And, among these, men with prior claims will have first crack at the limited room supply, subject of course to the discretion of the Masters.

One factor, however, that the Administration seems not to have considered is this: not all of the graduating Seniors will be leaving from so-called "over-crowded" rooms; rather, quite a few departures can be expected to cause genuine prewar vacancies in rooms that were not unwillingly expanded by an extra man last September. And the possibilities seem quite slim that men in the recently crowded suites will quickly pull up stakes and shuffle themselves around so that the nice, round sum of 40 empty spaces is created.

But even if there exist more than 40 vacancies, the Masters' decision is going to keep all but a small percentage of House applicants staying right where they are now. Even the House Masters must admit that few of their tennis are really suffering from any taxing problems in the supposed great post war jam. When they get together for their monthly meeting tomorrow night, let us hope that they reconsider their hasty scheme of returning to the 1946 kind of normalcy.