The Good Life

It's about time somebody gave the graduate student a break.

Traditionally the advanced student took his lodgings where he could find them, and generally high rents in Cambridge often meant he found them far away. The quality of his meals was directly proportional to the padding in his wallet. This meant Locke-Ober's occasionally but the Hayes-Bickford often. In either case, dinner table education was nothing to the graduate student but a memory from his college days. Education for the graduate student tended to be a tense business rather than the congenial occupation it had been before he had his A.B. or B.S.

Today the representatives of six graduate schools and the University Administration will dedicate a building project that should make the life of an advanced scholar more comfortable. Now the grad student has a living, social, and recreational unit of his own. And it is, in fact, a very good one.

Small rooms in the dormitories raised some large grines. But Architects Collaborative did a good job. With $2,000,000 it provided adequate housing for 575 students during a building boom. Each unit of the House system, built during a building depression, cost over $1,000,000.

At least new 990 grad students (an additional 415 are housed in nearby older dormitories which have been integrated with the Graduate Center) now live and eat together. The divinity student will meet the public administration man. Probably they'll learn from each other.

The Harkness Commons, with its lounge rooms, glass walls, sunken courtyard, and murals emphasizes the graduate student's return to good living.