BACK FROM SWITZERLAND

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Commenting on undergraduate teaching, your editorial chairman, Mr. Cramer, has asked with a certain note of petulance why I do not spend an "occasional winter" in Cambridge. Alas, my first reaction was to be grateful. I've been away a lot in the last forty years, and this is the first time anyone has complained. But perhaps professors who are so queried should return a serious answer.

I've always found it difficult to write unless I gave it my whole attention. So in recent years I've been teaching in the autumn and writing in the winter. The writing, needless to say, being at my own expense. The justification for such a pleasant arrangement, if there is one, is that even students seem marginally more interested in my books than in my rhetoric.

Mr. Cramer has a further and richly justified suspicion of anyone who, deserting the filthy snow and fog of Cambridge, turns up on a fashionable pasturage in Switzerland. But on this the answer is simple. We found it first. John Kenneth Galbraith   Warburg Professor of Economics