"HELLO! HELLO!"

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The article by your Mr. Alexander in the Freshman Registration Issue, while purporting to bid the class of '72 "Hello! Hello!," seemed, rather than a greeting, to be a potent mixture of good and bad rhetoric, of truth and error, of hope and despair, of, if you will, "Hello!" and "Goodbye!" A partial antidote is here offered.

Mr. Alexander is on the one hand quite right: for anyone is mistaken who came here expecting to be entertained at lectures delivered by professors passionately devoted to capturing forever the adolescent mind; they are indeed too busy with their own concerns for that. The sad truth is, however, that not only at Harvard, but in every school, the only intellectual stimulation of lasting value is from within a student himself; no classroom, however glittering, can goad him to an end he is loath to achieve. The professors Mr. Alexander describes have failed indeed: but they have failed in the impossible. I do not deny that we love and respect most those professors who make the glorious attempt to reach other people in a profound way; but what distinguishes them is a quality not essential to a professor or an administrator, a businessman or a craftsman--to be humane is not a virtue restricted to any segment of men. There are more great professors here than at most schools; but supremely great human beings are not numerous here, or anywhere. Mr. Alexander, then, does well to shock the newcomers out of expecting this to be a sacred place, untainted by the shortcomings of the world; but I don't know whether he has convinced himself.

On behalf of us graduate students, I would submit that, like those at Berkeley, Wisconsin, and Michigan, we do our best. We are very sorry, those of us who love to teach, that we have to devote so much time to the furtherance of our careers and personal lives. But this happens everywhere; and it seems that most of our students are no less self-sacrificing than we, nor do many expect so much selflessness of themselves. I think a more just appraisal than Mr. Alexander's would find large numbers of us doing more in this community than grinding away in Widener. Jackson Bryce   Miniprofessor of the Classics, and   Resident Tutor in Music, Adams House