Exiles' Return

After Mr. Harkness gave his money, and Mr. Lowell accepted it, University Hall decided that one of the first things the new House system should do was to bring students of all academic levels together in a social community. Undergraduates, graduates and senior faculty, it felt, had spread themselves all over Cambridge, and had made the University merely a meeting ground for the fleeting hours of morning classes. The Houses, it believed, were ideally suited to make Harvard an intellectual community based upon social as well as academic contact. Implementing this thinking, it arranged to install graduate students, at a ratio of about one to every ten undergraduates, in the Houses.

Then when Mr. Conant arrived, he made House residence for undergraduates mandatory. Perforce, out went graduate students, in came undergraduates, so that the ratio soared to one to 44. Now that more Houses, if not Harkness millions, seem assured, it is time to recognize and reaffirm the original aims of the Houses: grad students should return from exile, bringing with them the stimulation they've hidden away in the icy Siberia of the Grad Center.

Young scholars traditionally are more talkative than men who have been immersed in a foggy specialty over the years. Young people traditionally make friends easier, traditionally make friends easier, traditionally are more tolerant of others bcause others must be more tolerant of them. An influx of grad students to the Houses would bring to undergraduates the views of more mature men, still socially accessible yet of greater experience. It would tend to obscure the distinctions between the levels of academic work, making the transition from the College to GSAS or other schools less frightening. Exchange of original ideas would tend less to be stifled by a falsely induced social incompatibility.

And it is certain that many graduate students would find the golden haze of the House dining hall thoroughly congenial. The Grad Center has often appeared to be an ill-sorted melange of law, theology and physics students, each with his specific interest, none with a particularly large group of associates from which to choose his friends. The House would surely both widen his scope of interest and give him more opportunity to express ideas on his own subject to breathless undergraduate diners.

When University Hall again overhauls the House system, which it will certainly be forced to do when it has its hundred millions, or so, in hand, it should give graduate students a chance to return from the lonely, fluorescent garrets of the mirthless stone and steel around Harkness Common. Grad students probably would do wonders for the intellectual tone of the Houses.