A SHABBY GENTILITY

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The recent tuition rise, especially considering the un-conscionable form it has taken, presents a capital problem in the economics of modern education. It is on this larger question, rather than on such too-obvious injustices as the football-tax and the $200 kick-back to be exacted from teaching fellows, that I should like to comment.

The University Administration stands indicted it seems to me, rather for the general approach to our financial plight than for any particular maneuver it has invented. Inflation has probably become perennial. Whether or not this is bad for the country at large it is obviously bad for endowed institutions. Therefore, the only honest solution is austerity. As long as we try to race the system by raising the tuition, we are being dishonest.

We seem to fail to recognize that the best education is not necessarily the most expensive. Even if this is a disputable proposition, our circumstances demand that we set ourselves to trying to prove to the world that it is true. Instead, we seem to acquiesce to the stale view that the ideal of a good education is only attainable by means of more and more outlay. We decide, for example, that athletes have their place in a perfect educational scheme, so we include a further subsidy to that department in a tuition rise that is serious enough in itself. Could we perhaps get along with fewer coaches, with a less elaborate program, and in this way make it easier for students to get a Harvard education? Similarly, is maid-service or education at a reasonable price more important? Is it more important to have instruction and research going on in every field or to offer certain subjects under the best man at a price students can afford?

In short, we must choose between the essential and the incidental. Perhaps it is healthy to have to make such a choice. Whether or not that is true, choice is the lot of the poor. Endowed colleges, even Harvard, are poor. It is no good pawning the family possessions in order to maintain a sort of shabby gentility, and that is what perpetual tuition rises amount of if you stop to examine their moral complexion. --Charles M. Gray 2G