The Counsellor and the Dean

Today, with its biggest enrollment in history successfully swallowed and with a gradual return to normal expected to start next fall, the University stands astride the conquered problems of the immediate postwar veteran influx and contemplates the coming problems of readjustment. Pausing only for a quick glance backward on a nearly finished job, Wilbur, J. Bender's 'Report On The Veteran" in the current Alumni Bulletin throws a penetrating searchlight onto the matter of Harvard, the veteran, and the future. As Counsellor for Veterans, Mr. Bender has ponted clearly to the problems which, as the next Dean of the College, he will have a major share in solving.

First among these stands tuition. Today Harvard has the lowest rates of any major college in the East. Yale, Dartmouth, and M.I.T. have succumbed to the onslaught of higher costs by raising their tuition, and there is no guarantee that Harvard will not be forced to follow suit in the future. But, as Mr. Bender points out, a raise in tuition may "price Harvard out of the market" when it comes to maintaining its standings as a democratic institution on a national basis. Students from the Mid and Far West would be unlikely to shell out increased tuition, and another hundred or so for the Pullman people twice a year, while meeting high metropolitan living expenses, when they could go to increasingly good state colleges almost for nothing.

More immediately and not much less potently than a rise in tuition, the attitude of the veteran threatens to change the nature of the College. "The lights are burning very late," Mr. Bender writes, "and there is not much leisurely talk or fellowship or group spirit. In the College, particularly, there is an unhealthy emphasis on grades." Here is a problem that Bender will inherit in all its complexity from Dean Hanford next July: how to relax the veteran and Keep Harvard from becoming a round-the-clock grind factory. This is no easy task, with graduate schools expecting their peak demand for admission to last longer than in the College. Nonetheless, a greater emphasis on activities, more efficiently run activities, a Student Activities Center--in general, more official interest in the extra-curriculum, might help to alleviate what it known, in quotes, as "student apathy."

Other, less concrete issues fall into the beam of Mr. Bender's searchlight. The fact, for instance, that students "are not very hopeful of the good times coming and tend to concentrate on digging individual foxholes in he shape of training for careers" stands opposed to the non-professionalized aims of the general education plan. This conflict and the issues of tuition and extra-curricular life are the biggest but by no means the only questions raised by Mr. Bender's "Report," which covers everything from the problems of the married veteran to those of the engineer who has forgotten his mathematics during the war. The new dean has cut out his work for himself.