FRESHMAN COMMUTERS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Your splendid article on the problems of the commuting student does not mention what seems to me to be an important distinction which is made at Harvard between commuting and resident students. The resident arrives at Harvard for a freshman year centered in the Yard and at the Union. In the former he sleeps, studies, attends classes and bull sessions; in the latter, he eats and finds many of his social contacts: The friendships which he makes in both places are those which tend to determine the pattern of his upperclass years. The commuter, on the other hand, has his locker at Dudley House and, if he has any extracurricular contact with the College at all, tends to find it there. No effort is made to integrate the commuter into his class or actively to encourage him to meet and form friendships with his classmates among resident students....

Surely it would be possible to bring commuters into the center of Harvard life as freshmen, to get them off to a better start--as near as possible that of the rest of their classmates--as full members of the Harvard community. The commuter's sense of isolation and frustration portrayed in your article would be lessened, perhaps forced out of existence, by a constructive program to insure his participation in freshman activities.

Such a program might include the following features: 1. No freshman to be a member of Dudley House or participate in its activities. There is no reason why the commuter should be a House member as a freshman any more than is his resident classmate. 2. Provisions for lockers for commuting Freshmen at the Union. 3. Provision for a 6-lunch meal ticket for Union lunches at a price sufficiently low so that all might afford it. Some arrangements might be made for evening meals as well to insure that when commuting freshmen eat in the Square they do so with their classmates whenever possible. 4. Provision of several suites in the Yard where commuting freshmen might stay overnight and where they may live for periods of two weeks each during the year in order to sample the features of "living-in."

These tentative proposals or others might provide for those freshmen who have to commute enough contact with the rest of their class to integrate them into the College community to a degree higher than at present. By separating freshmen from upperclassmen among commuters as among residents the College would change the emphasis from "freshman commuters" to "commuting freshmen." No longer would a man be able to spend four years at Harvard wholly in the society of the Boston-oriented, and the problem of the commuter at Harvard might be one step nearer solution. Harold L. Burstyn '51 1G