Charity's Returns

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Service has gone out of fashion and most undergraduates have to be wheedled into work that was once done ungrudgingly. Harvard men do not take part in Social Service as they once did. Much of the work in the education of boys who play in the streets of Cambridge and Boston goes undone while Harvard students use their time to their own advantage. To this the answer may cynically be, "What of it?"

Just this, Harvard men all over the world are carrying on a tradition of helpfulness in the social problems of the communities they live in. We in Harvard now are letting this tradition go by the board. The facts are that men of College age are the ones on whom the responsibility for giving leadership to the boys of the community falls. It is this responsibility that Harvard undergraduates will not face.

How illogical this situation is would be hard to overstate. We are told self-interest dictates the decision of young men of today, that in all probability the work of the world must in the future be figured out on a basis of the cash value to those who do it. But where in all of the activities open to Harvard students can one find an activity having more cash value than working with the boys of poorer districts of Boston? Four years after entering College most men have to secure a job, usually in a business organization. One of the first questions a man is asked is what experience in life he has had. The four years of college are eliminated immediately. It is just such an experience as boys' work in Boston that the employer is looking for. Any one man's education can lack a good many things but it cannot lack some knowledge of the 90 percent of the people of the country who do not go to college. This is the cash value that social service offers.

No man need stay out of social service for what he thinks is his lack of qualifications. Any hobby that a man may have or any activity he himself may have taken part in, can usually be turned to advantage in boys' work. Harvard men can as a rule give some of their time to three or four extra curricular activities. In the past, the leading men that the college has had have given their time to some form of social service, because they believed in service and because they recognized the cash value of social service. Gordon Huggins.