The New Catalogue

The new catalogue is paradoxical in content. Minus eighty-one pages and the drab grey cover of last year, it represents a definite abridgement of the courses offered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Some have been eliminated entirely while others have of necessity been confined to the summer or fall or spring semesters. But the green-bound pages, in more optimistic aspect, furnish concrete evidence that too many tears have been shed prematurely over the bier of Harvard's liberal tradition. Courses in the humanities still abound, with even unlooked-for additions.

The complaints that the catalogue has engendered already, and those which will crescendo in force as more summer study cards receive serious attention, center in the scientific branches of instruction. Premedical students lament their inability to complete requirements as hopefully planned. Physics, biology, and chemistry majors air grievances of conflicting lab and lecture hours, and of irreconcilable examination groups. The uninitiated to curricular complexities moan because the catalogue is too thin, if for no other reason.

The flood tide of criticism can be dammed for it is resolvable into intense but insubstantial currents: first, a sedimental resistance to readjustment within facilities limited by the demands of the Army and Navy; second, admirable foresight in petition but feeble narrowness in attitude towards the "catastrophe" of conflicts, which, it is to be hoped, will soon be repaired by University Hall where necessary and possible; and third, unjust treatment of a catalogue that is eminently "honest," that does not waste pages on bracketed courses that will not be given, and does make clear the limitations which must be faced.