Home, Sweet House

Lo, the poor commuter! He spends a good percentage of his time traveling back and forth from home to College in some antiquated form of transportation, and when he gets to Harvard at last he just cannot enjoy the full benefits of its educational facilities. For many years University Hall, after having looked into the problem from all but the most fantastic angles, has been sunk in a great slough of apathy so far as the commuter is concerned.

Now, by the simple process of giving Dudley a Senior Tutor along with the other seven Houses, the University has raised the Commuters' Center greatly in the eyes of the commuters themselves. At last they will be in some respect equal to the resident students. This new-found equality should do much to rid the commuter of the weighty inferiority complex that he has been carrying for many years.

But the Senior Tutor plan comes nowhere near to solving the problem of what to do with a non-resident student in a primarily resident college. Some people have proposed that the University require all men to live in the College, at least for a year or two. Since most non-resident students commute because they cannot afford to live in the College, such a plan would work only if men living in the Boston area were given additional scholarships. Giving scholarship money to these men would keep it from equally needy students from distant parts of the country. Such a solution is no solution at all.

Commuters there must be, but ideally they should be fitted in with the rest of the Harvard community, in order to give them the education through personal contact which the University values. This sort of education will obviously never be achieved if commuters remain segregated on a little island of their own in the midst of the University mainstream. This integration with the rest of the College, could probably be best worked out through a system of non-residencies in the Houses for commuters. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the Houses are just too crowded to take more men either on a residence or non-residence basis.

What remains as the only possible thing to do, therefore, is to improve the status of the commuter through the means and facilities now available. Commuters suffer from a great many things which never seriously bother resident students. The nine p.m. limit on taking reserve books from Lamont may be an annoyance for the resident, but it is a serious obstacle to the commuter. The University refuses to allow books out earlier so that residents will not suffer through books being unavailable. However, as the system works now commuters do all the suffering.

Commuters would be better integrated into University life if they took more part in extra-curricular activities. At present, however, the Center closes every evening at five-thirty, and thus the commuter who stays around to go to a game or a lecture or a club meeting in the evening has no place of his own to wait in. The expense of keeping the Center open until 11 p.m. would not be great, and if enough men did not use it during the extended hours the Center could go back to its usual hours.

Finally, the University should officially change the name of Dudley Hall to "Dudley House." This is a small step, but one of great importance to commuters, who keenly feel their separation from the House system. Recognition of Dudley as an eighth House would ameliorate its present anomalous status and give commuters a fuller membership in Harvard.