PRIVILEGED LACKIES

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The Social Relations Department, while trying to eliminate malpractices among its thesis-writing students, has chosen to overlook a particularly outrageous policy on the part of its thesis-supervising faculty members. These professors, anxious to complete a pet research project, simply assign the problem to a willing senior, putting office staff, equipment, and expense accounts at his disposal, and later accepting his results as an honors thesis. Thus students in other departments, working independently, must watch a privileged few get their ideas and procedures devised by faculty members and handed to them on a silver platter. This is especially unfair in a Social Relations thesis, where the idea and the procedural techniques are the most important elements. The affair becomes even more unsavory in the case of several students working on the same assigned project: one may simply be doing mechanical work such as adding up the results--admittedly necessary drudgery, but hardly on a level with the creative work required from the unpatronized majority.

Unethical practices like these can only lower the prestige of a department which can little afford additional discredit. Edward Sachar '52