DOWNGRADING

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

It appears that Harvard, too, or perhaps especially, has succumbed to a distinctly American ideology; for University officials now promise us bigger and better Dean's Lists along with our bigger and better Houses, facilities, scholarships, and tuitions. We are assured that the percentage of students on the Dean's List is increasing rapidly and steadily, and that we may look forward to a time in the very near future when at least half the class appears on this distinctive roster.

True, this increase provides a positive measure for the improved quality of each entering class, but conceivably the Dean's List will soon come to be meaningless as an academic achievement. Dean's List students who are only in the top fifty per cent of their class will be no more able to enter the graduate schools of their choice than students in the same percentile at present. Larger honor lists, therefore, are misleading. Even more, they are strong proof of Harvard's failure to raise its own academic standards. The list itself does not mean that much; it could be changed to include only students in Group II. But this would vindicate a chance remark of Professor Owen, who commented in a History 142 lecture that the "gentleman's C" of yesteryear is now a "gentleman's B minus." If more students each year make the Dean's List because they are better students, it means that Harvard fails to raise its standards--what it expects of these students--accordingly.

We congratulate the Deans and the University Administration for attracting better qualified students. Yet at the same time we would be willing to take their word for it that we are all getting better, for the sake of raised academic standards. Daniel M. Musher '59