Study in Saddle Shoes

Monday afternoon's tantalizing headlines both raised delicious visions of the new order at Harvard College and created the less attractive possibility that John Harvard might find himself sharing his solitary grandeur with a bronze tribute to Carrie Nation or Dean Gildersleeve. But apoplectic University officialdom banished mounting hopes and fears by explaining that what the Boston Press labeled "co-education" was no more than the unsensational policy of joint instruction that has been pursued for four years.

The Faculty action of April 15 which created such a furor was simply a move to make permanent the war-born system and prevent restriction of joint instruction when the University returns to "normal" in June, 1948. Harvard and Radcliffe, despite the partial fusion of faculty and courses and the high percentage of Radcliffe students that eventually marry Harvard men, have been and will continue to be two separate institutions. Continuation of the present policy, which permits 'Cliffedwellers to take Harvard courses above Freshman level, will keep to a minimum the number of professors who hold forth in New Lecture Hall or Emerson and an hour or so later toddle across the Square to deliver the same soporific to saddle-shoed, plaid-skirted intellectuals. Course offerings of the two colleges are 80 similar that it is a waste of men, time, and money not to bring classes together wherever space permits. Only the large Freshman courses are ordinarily so crowded that combination lectures or class discussions become impracticable, and these courses are excluded from the joint instruction program.

About the only serious argument used against mixed classes is that they limit discussion by introducing an inhibiting sex consciousness. But for a generation which likes to consider itself as one that treats facts as facts, this is hardly an obstacle, especially when most marginal discussion consists of shady anecdotes, which are not essential to the course. Besides it's difficult to see how sex could be introduced into-say Gov. 6.