GRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I'm writing to protest the university's thoughtless cruelty in denying scholarships to the graduate students who filed their applications late. This is cruel because many of the students were not properly reminded of the dead-line and some have reasons for their tardiness; and it is depressing for the attitude it reveals towards the whole business of graduate scholarships.

The purpose of scholarships is to enable good people to study in the graduate schools, and therefore an ideal scholarship office would want to review as many applications as possible. Our office is not ideal. Instead, it prefers to imagine that it is running some sort of lottery to which few are called and few are chosen. The officials involved, kindly men, feel terrible about all this. They wring their hands and tear their garments, but what can they do?

They can do plenty. They can stop paying attention to administration for its own sake; they can stop caring so much about deadlines. They can start honoring their rules, like all the sensible rules at Harvard University, in the breach. Joseph L. Featherstone 2G