Dorm Room Decorations and Wartime Pressures

Every week, The Crimson publishes a selection of articles that were printed in our pages in years past.

December 24, 1875: Pictures and So Forth.

The ordinary decorations of college rooms are very tiresome. Wherever you go the same faces stare down at you from the walls; the same figures appear in the same more or less proper attitudes; the same white shingles with monstrous red seals, and sometimes the same silver medals, with ribbons chosen by the happy owner's friends and patrons, grow as tiresome as the same bell which has rung the College up to prayers for goodness knows how many years.

Most men appear to think that when they have purchased a print or two, the moral character of which is regulated by the reputation which they desire to maintain; when they have been elected to the St. Paul's, the Chess Club, the Institute, or the Athenaeum, etc., ad infinitum, and have encircled their shingles with gray passe-partouts; when they have carelessly slung any medals that they may possess over the shingles aforesaid, and when they have put photographs of a popular actress or two—probably Rosina Vokes, and some loose character in tights—on their mantelpieces, they have paid attention enough to aesthetics. They appear to regard pictures, and decorations in general, as convenient inventions to fill bare walls; they appear to decorate their rooms, if they take the trouble to decorate them at all, with little more appreciation and intelligence than were used by the wealthy gentleman who purchased his library by the pound.

The truth is that they do not understand the real value in daily life of what may be called artistic surroundings. It is by no means necessary to have every stick of furniture carved on the very nicest plan that the system of Eastlake has produced; nor to arrange every corner of a room with a studied attention to the picturesque, which would make it look like a magnified reproduction of a modern genre picture. But it is, if not absolutely necessary, at least highly desirable to hang upon your walls pictures that will suggest ideas; pictures at which you can look with pleasure for more than a single moment; pictures of which you will in time grow fond, instead of longing at the end of a couple of months to pitch them out of the window.

December 29, 1944: Dean Landis Will Return to Law School From Egypt Next Month

Mounting pressure of war and post-war problems facing the University has led to the announcement yesterday that James M. Landis, Dean of Harvard Law School, will return from Cairo, where he has been serving as American Director of Economic Operations in the Middle East, to resume his duties as Dean of the Law School. According to a statement by Acting Dean Edmund M. Morgan '02, Dean Landis is expected to arrive from Africa "within the early part of January," and will take up his former duties immediately afterward.

Of the various wartime problems now confronting the Law School, those which will draw Dean Landis' first attentions on his return include the treatment of returning veterans and the placing of them in their proper place in the program, the imminent consideration of revised and enlarged curricula for the already expanding enrollment at the Law School, and the rebuilding of the greatly depleted faculty of the School.

—Compiled by Rebecca D. Robbins