Peddlers Keep Out

An edict appeared recently on one of the House bulletin boards declaring that the dining hall of that House would no longer be available, with certain exceptions, to College-wide extracurricular activities for purposes of ticket-selling, poll-taking, or any other form of solicitation. Investigation disclosed that the policy on this problem varied considerably from House to House, but that the House Masters are thinking of forming a joint policy that would apply in all dining halls. Should the Masters adopt the drastic Lowell House formula, every one of the College's threescore extracurricular organizations would be placed under a tremendous handicap, and it is doubtful that the student body as a whole would profit by an enforced isolation from activities in which it already takes far too little part.

Some House Masters contend that the money changers should be driven from the temple and that unsuspecting students should be spared the daily broadside of solicitation when they enter to take their meals. No doubt there has been a lack of system and order under present rules, and, on some days, the entrance to the dining halls have resembled the eastern end of Memorial Hall on registration day. But the Masters should remember that as much as they might desire it, College extracurricular life is College-centered and not House-centered and that the dining hall is the only place in Harvard's heterogeneity where even a fair proportion of the undergraduates can be reached without prohibitive effort.

One of the principal advantages of a large community or a large College is the great variety of activity that is open to any individual. By shutting the College activities out of the Houses the Masters will only eliminate the primary advantage of bigness and will be unable to offer any worthwhile substitute. As long as there is no real center of undergraduate life in a more convenient location than Phillips Brooks House, the Houses are the only ground on which the activities can operate when they require direct contact with the student body.

One solution to the problem might be an orderly establishment of an activities table in the vestibule or entrance to the dining halls, at which, by prior permission from the House Secretaries, one organization at a time, and only one at any given meal, would have the use of the table. Such a table, placed on a permanent basis, should eliminate much of the confusion that now results from hasty, ill-prepared arrangements for solicitation and ease frayed nerves on the part of both the solicitors and the solicited. Activities promoters would be assured of facilities, and students would know just where to go to buy their concert tickets or return their opinion polls.

In reaching a final, consistent policy decision, if that is their determination, the Masters might well consider that one does not settle a traffic jam by banning traffic but rather by regulating the traffic and building better roads.