Retro Me, Satanus

"I find," lamented Tutor Wigglesworth in 1653, "the spirits of all or most, off from studys, and going a gadding after vanity and mispence of time." The timelessness of this discovery is such that even the University police have not missed it. It is good to know that they are taking steps to meet the problem, but one wonders if closing the Yard gates at eight p.m. is the best way of doing so.

To be sure, in the days when, according to a pious correspondent, "this hath been a place certainly more free from temptations to lewdness than ordinarily England has been . . .',, locking the gates was sure-fire, but the College has since spread out a little. Rank riot and excess in the form of Cambridge streets awaits every sophomore, junior, and senior who leaves his room. The subway stands ready to rocket inmates of the Houses into "the company and society of such men who lead an ungirt and dissolute life," and all the chained gates in Cambridge cannot revive President Chauncey's ban on students entering military companies.

The police are not able to protect even the freshmen, for every night several gates are left wide open. Admittedly, they are the most inconvenient possible and require everyone to walk all over the Yard in search of an exit. But if police think that this could discourage those to whom "Vice is Now Become Alamode," they are mistaken. Their efforts will have no more permanent effect than President Dunsters when, according to Professor Morison, he emptied his horn of gunpowder in the middle of the Yard, laid a train, touched it off with a live coal, and "blew the Devil out of Harvard College."