Creeping Commercialism

The Dunster Dunces recently received an offer to appear on a nationwide TV show, Name That Tune. Like the Band, Glee Club, Hasty Pudding, and numerous faculty members, they could not accept the offer because of a University rule which has remained all but invariable for over ten years. Adopted and periodically reaffirmed by a Corporation vote, the rule states that Harvard's name may not be used in connection with a radio or television show.

The Corporation feels that organizations and faculty members would be in effect selling the name of Harvard to money-making hucksters and sellers of soap. In 1950, for example, the Monsanto Chemical Company offered the Glee Club $300 to sing on one of a series of shows featuring New England singing groups. The Glee Club could not accept the offer, because it was felt that $300 was an insulting bid from ad men who would make $30,000 from the show.

But balancing a possible public inference that Harvard drives Mercurys, were the Glee Club to appear on an Ed Sullivan show, are the favorable impressions presented by reasonably screened undergraduate groups and faculty members, and valuable experiences for student dramatic and musical organizations.

In practice, of course, the Corporation comprises its ideals by allowing the Atlantic Refining Company to broadcast football games. There seems to be little difference, by their reasoning, between Harvard's "keeping your car on the go;" and her wishing everybody used Dial soap: except that the broadcasts were begun long ago, before the rule was adopted, in response to wide alumni interest in the games. But certainly the University has in the past ignored alumni interest and feels that undergraduate sentiment is almost as important a factor.

There must be judgement on opportunities for sponsored appearances because there can be no hard and fast criterion of evaluating offers. Each case poses the problem of whether the show, the student group, and the material offered are all acceptable, and whether the whole situation is attractive to both organization and Corporation. But the point is not as much who's to judge, and with what criteria, as that the rule should be modified or dropped to allow judgement to enter. The University should not utilize what is for all practical purposes a comfortable, paradoxical, and rather moth-eaten blanket ruling of no.