AMATEUR STANDING DEFENDED

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The Advocate having received so courteous a review in the CRIMSON, I hope that I shall not seem any the less courteous in writing to correct an error of fact, or perhaps of interpretation, that appeared at the end of Mr. Sokolov's article.

We are by no means about to "end the magazine's amateur status." No one could be more aware than the Advocate staff that the Magazine's only raison d'etre is none other than to present the work of Harvard writers, graduate and undergraduate, to the Harvard community; and if I was quoted in the September 25 CRIMSON as saying that the purpose of our new biennial schedule and quarterly-sized format is to enable us to publish "more professional stuff," the quotation, in being lifted somewhat out of context, became regrettably distorted. The new format and schedule are intended to allow the Advocated to print just as much material as it has in the past, while relieving the editors from the pressure of six deadlines a year. We do indeed hope that such a plan will enable us to become more "professional"--but only in the sense that having more time for our editorial tasks, we will be able in the end to put out a more fully-worked and polished publication. The Advocate's writers will remain Harvard writers, and its policy will remains what it has been for ninety-six years: to publish the best creative writing in Cambridge.

As for the "recognized writers" whom Mr. Sokolov mentions, we do intend to publish, in addition to the two regular issues each year, at least one "special" issue, devoted to a single literary figure or topic. These issues will most certainly be written by and for members of the Harvard community. In the first of the series only, an issue which will present a set of articles on the work of Robert Lowell, we hope to include a number of contribution from "recognized writers" and two or three new poems of Mr. Lowell's, in addition to several articles by Harvard writers. Such issues have occurred three times in the Advocate's recent history, about once every ten years, and have surely done nothing to impair "the magazine's amateur status." Burton A. Meinick, President, The Harvard Advocate