Late Entry

For years undergraduates have been complaining in vain about the University's blue laws. The authorities have remained adamant, but when the Housemasters convene next Wednesday, they will no longer have an excuse for delaying relaxation of the parietal rules.

Last year the Student Council drew up a petition to change the eight o'clock weekend curfew and placed it before the board of Housemasters, who promptly tabled the issue. They gave the tenuous draft situation as their excuse. If many upperclassmen left college freshmen might have to fill the vacant spaces in the Houses making liberal room permissions unwise. But few men entered the armed forces over the summer, and there is no longer any basis for using the crisis situation as a bogeyman to block a change in the rules.

The reasons for changing the parietal rules are sound and simple. The high cost of living at the University makes female companionship an expensive luxury, and with no place to entertain his date, the Harvard man is driven to Boston's high-priced cabarets or low-priced dives. Now that room rents have gone up 15% and there is a strong possibility that tuition and board charges will follow suit, the Undergraduate will have to dig even deeper if he is to go out at all.

Secondly, the University's attitude towards the student is inconsistent. Harvard considers a man mature enough to run his academic career, and yet stands in loco parentis and rules his social life. The undergraduate should be as entitled to entertain women in his room as he is to pick his courses or study when he pleases. If Harvard wants to turn out the "whole man," its week-end paternalism is misplaced.

Of course someone will always raise the cry of immorality. But what can occur between eight and eleven can also happen in the afternoon. It is significant that Yale authorities extended week-end room permissions to eleven o'clock because they felt the boys at New Haven were old enough to behave themselves.

A well-known professor once remarked that whenever there was progress in educational institutions, Harvard moved twenty years before anyone else. When it comes to a sound system of parietal rules, however, the University is lagging far behind. Next Wednesday the Housemasters will have a chance to rectify the situation.