Shaken Confidence

"We have confidence in the maturity and intelligence of Harvard students." Dean Bender, March, 1949

In the past few years, the annual petitions for changes in parietal rules have died quiet and unexplained deaths in Housemasters conferences. This time, however, the Masters approved the proposed change; the obituary of this year's effort is contained in a letter from Dean Bender, who presided at the execution, to the president of the Student Council.

This obituary is unsatisfactory in many respects. It is far more significant for what it omitted than for what it said. It is the skeleton of an argument, and as such is difficult to attack though incapable of standing by itself.

The doctrinal crux of the letter lies in the sentence: "Nevertheless, the College has an inescapable responsibility to lay down regulations which will help to maintain the highest standards of personal conduct among its students or at least not encourage a departure from such standards." But what are these "highest standards of personal conduct" of which Dean Bender speaks? Surely they could not be defined to exclude personal cleanliness, regularity of study habits, of refraining from over-indulgence in alcohol. Yet the College makes no attempt to regulate any of these, precisely because it has "confidence in the maturity and intelligence of Harvard men," as Dean Bender pointed out two and a half years ago.

There is an even more ridiculous aspect to the argument. Does Dean Bender really mean to imply that allowing girls in students rooms until eight p.m. "helps to maintain the highest standards of personal conduct" while allowing them in until eleven p.m. is contrary to those standards--so contrary that it warrants throwing out a proposal sponsored by all the representative upperclass organizations of the College and endorsed by the seven University officials who are to a great degree responsible for administering and enforcing the parietal rules in the Houses? This is an inconceivable position. The application of an absolute standard to a request for a change of degree, not of kind, seems to mean that Dean Bender is actually opposed to the principle of allowing students to entertain women in their rooms at any time. If so, then the students are entitled to know this, and to know why a College which believes in the greatest possible freedom for students and faculty in every other regard is opposed to it in this one.

The proposal of the Council and the House Committees was presented for practical, not moral reasons, and it deserved a practical answer. It did not get one. Concerning the very real problem of how students with limited incomes are to entertain dates on weekend evenings without spending a great deal of money or sitting in a beer parlor that probably does not "help to maintain the highest standards of personal conduct," Dean Bender's letter said: "We feel (this) problem is a real one and we hope that the Council will now work energetically with the Housemasters and House Committees in an effort to find other solutions." Just what solutions the letter doesn't say. Would Dean Bender favor a fraternity system to take care of evening entertainment, such as they have at the other colleges which he cites as having stricter parietal rules than those requested by the Council? Presumably not, for he said in the report on advising last fall: "The full potential of the House system can only be realized if the individual Houses are small enough to be manageable units for social, athletic, and activities purposes..." Yet it will be difficult to conceive of the Houses as social centers, no matter how small they are if students with dates are forced out of them at the social apex of the week.

Dean Bender notes that Yale now permits women in students rooms until eleven on Saturday nights, but has done so "only very recently and on an experimental basis." Why does this preclude Harvard from making the same sort of experiment in liberality? It is really a rather pathetic situation when we must hold back in fear from an experiment in greater freedom at a college which is the symbol of protest against Harvard's traditional liberalism.

Dean Bender's letter describes the Administrative Board's deliberations as striking "a proper balance between a realistic judgment of the probable results of the Council's proposal, if it were accepted, and our confidence in the decency and responsibility of most Harvard students and cur traditional policy of granting them as much freedom as possible to order their own lives." It seems that the confidence and traditional policy were outweighed by the consequences of a minor adjustment to a changed social situation. That changed situation has been recognized by the administrations of women's colleges, by other men's colleges such as Yale, by the Harvard student body, and by the seven Housemasters. We are surprised and disappointed that this recognition has not yet penetrated the Dean's Office.