TOWER OF LEARNING

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Mary of your readers thought that the front-page story on the Harvard Graduate School of Education's new tower was a bad joke, or a slur on the school, or both. True, the architect's sketch looked somewhat like the Timbuktu town hall or a crusaders' citadel along the Damacsus road, but the drawing was done by a respected Houston firm, which has planned a red brick veneer to harmonize with Cambridge style and sensibilities.

A recently-molted cockroach sports a shiny new chitin shell, but he's still an ugly bug. The tower of education's "massive walls and large windowless areas" shone like alabaster in the reproduction. In fact they will be the familiar mottled red, broken most months by bare, scraggly Ivy vines. Before many years in the local air, the red will lose its luster, the mortar will turn dull grey.

At that time, if not before, the aspiring teachers who know Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (and every teacher should) will begin to see the tower as something other than the beacon of American education. Behind the window slits, vaulted ports, and bulging bastions, grey-green scaly orks will lurk, whispering in the Black Speech, plotting hideous amusements. Hulking trolls will patrol the moat. Shelob, the monstrous arachnid, will have spun her webs among the stairways, ducts, and circuits of the "service perimeter." On the battlements will wait the flying Nazgul, their piercing cries cutting across the Common.

President Pusey is trying to find a new dean for the Graduate School of Education. What kind of man would want to be master of Barad-dur? Albert R. Edwards '64