Feet in the Door

It has been theorized on more than one occasion that what sets Harvard off from other colleges for better or worse is the social isolation caused by private bathrooms. "This phenomenon has been held responsible for everything from intellectual superiority to athletic importance, but thanks to the splendidly massive construction of the Houses nobody has ever tried to do anything about the situation.

But this term there has been a sly attempt to break down that social unsolidarity of which the decentralized plumbing is the prime symbol. We point with especial alarm to the emergence of two institutions which while they may seem relatively unimportant at present are feet in the door on the road to ruin.

The first of these is a commercial establishment which is unique in not appealing to that snobbishness in Harvard men which renders them more ludicrous than offensive. Instead it caters to the suppressed aggressions which when provided with channels for outlet turn their bearers into offenders against the order of the community. If you can't impress people by wearing unpadded suits and a bored look says this establishment impress them by shooting disappearing ink at them and shocking them electrically when they are induced to shake hands with you. It cannot be disputed that squirting ink is a quick and inexpensive way of breaking down a social reserve that might be unshaken by the very darkest grey flannel, but with this break down the entire fabric of social dency and respectability is torn into shreds all for the sake of letting out a few miserable frustrations and filling a vulgar tradesman's coffers.

The second and far more dangerous innovation is so called "Regatta Weekend." We might ignore the emergence of straw hats connected with this "weekend," hoping that like the Confederate caps of yesterday month they would pass away and not turn us into a replica of a certain college in the New Jersey mud flats. We might even overlook the massing of more than a sixth of the College into a gymnasium where for an exorbitant price a student was permitted to transport himself and one friend through a dark steamy atmosphere for the better part of four hours; that is a matter of individual taste. But when the regattas consider it their duty to put themselves in command of a public stretch of river front and to ordain the locations from which members of various organizations shall be permitted to view a public athletic spectacle then they have overstepped their bounds. They have not be thought themselves where they are. Impressed with the organized fun of a Hammonasset Day, imbued with the planned debauchery of a Winter Carnival they have destroyed Harvard men's "splendid isolation." With their colleagues of the water pistols and ink-squirters they have made the ideal of gentlemanly living a hollow mockery.

We trust that the specter of junior proms, Big Men on Campus fraternities and all the rest that must inevitably follow if the trend is maintained, will be sufficient to raise opposition to the twin pronged threat that confronts the College. Otherwise there may soon be no men left who remember when the words. "All College Weekend" invoked only puzzled amusement and for whom water pistols were simply a Kirkland House Aberration.