TRANSFER RIGHTS

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Harvard recently decided to accept no transfer students next year (or almost none.) This decision is appalling and should be reversed. If anything, we need more transfer students.

No one can deny that there are, at other colleges, hundreds of excellent students with good qualifications and strong desires to be students here. But I argue not for their rights but towards the good of us all; we need transfer students. They are highly motivated, capable, and know from experience how to cope with college. Most valuable of all they have perspective; they have lived and worked successfully at another college.

I have just returned to Harvard from Hampshire College, and know that I understand Harvard far better, and can give it more and receive more, than in my earlier time here.

Transfer students as a group are needed to help us understand how college can be different, and what's right and wrong about Harvard, and what it could be at best. Ultimately everyone benefits from a better understanding of this college and of our relations to it--Harvard attitudes can be very provincial, you mustn't forget.

Whatever the solutions to the housing crisis (and sex-ratio problem) may be, barring transfer students is not one of them. Jonathan S. Watson '75