"The Old Dog" Answers Critics of Modern Youth--Believes Undergraduates of Today Keener Than Their Fathers

"Liberal Club members, grinds, CRIMSON candidates--all are alike in one respect; they have a narrow, intense perspective," said Frederick Orin Bartlett '26, short-story writer, in an interview. He is probably best known as "The Old Dog", under which name he has written a series of college stories. Mr. Bartlett studied at the University intermittently during the closing years of the last century and nearly 25 years later came to Harvard again, this time to get a degree with the class of 1926.

"Yet these young men who devote themselves so completely to one thing or even one group of things," he continued, "for all their inaccurate perspective and narrowness, are not only typical of youth but also serve a very definite purpose in life. They concentrate all their energies on one point. It is like bringing the waters of a wide stream together in a narrow channel where it will flow faster Vividness, emotion, intensity, these are all products of concentration on a single point. When we survey things from a distance in a more nearly proper perspective, we find it harder to be moved.

Older people often complain of the one-sidedness of youth, deploring their lack of mature wisdom. Suppose there were a community in which all the young people were equipped with the mature and more casual point of view of men of 40 or 50 years old: How dull, how uninteresting that community would be! And among the first to raise a howl would be the older generation."

In reply to a query as to what changes could be noticed in the undergraduates of today as compared with those of 26 years ago, Mr. Bartlett declared, "The college men of today are a much cleverer bunch. But why should they not be? Their field of interests is wider than that of their predecessors. The rapid transportation of the day brings a far wider circle of the land within the easy reach of the students. They have, therefore, acquired a social culture considerably greater than the undergraduate of several decades ago."