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Reading this year's yearbook, Three Thirty One, isn't reading about what was significant or meaningful at Harvard this year. It's like re-reading last year's yearbook. Or the one before that. Or the one before that. With the exception of your own picture (and if you aren't graduating, you probably don't even have that consolation) there's very little in this year's book to distinguish it from past editions.

Tied down by a format that deals with just the most obvious subjects -- the administration, the Houses, the athletic teams, Harvard bureaus and offices -- the editors of Three Thirty One have managed to miss much of what was significant this year. Dean Monro's resignation and his Miles College appointment rate only a few paragraphs as does Dean Glimp's appointment as Dean of the College. Undergraduate anxiety about the draft, a topic which might have produced a nice mood piece, is barely mentioned. The only articles that seem to have any relevance to developments this year are a piece on the Kennedy Institute, and one on the rise of student film-making.

It's impossible to determine why the Faculty members profiled this year are profiled. Three Thirty One does profile some of the All Time Great, but wouldn't articles on men like Oscar Handlin, Edwin O. Reischauer, Bernard Malamud, Rober Lowell, or Gar Alperovitz, all in the news this year, have been more appropriate?

Many profiles are fatuous. They open with anecdotes, ramble a while, then close with an anecdote or tag that is just dripping with Meaning. Collect all the last paragraphs of Yearbook articles and you'd have either the Key to the Cosmos or something Elbert Hubbard would have been happy to print.

There's nothing in Three Thirty One that will raise your eye-brows. The article on President Pusey reveals little about the man. The profile of Leonard K. Nash is, in terms of information, the same one they printed a few years ago. That Nash is a wonderful teacher is virtually common knowledge, but how he has restructured Nat Sci 4 or why he grew that flowing beard is not.

The Radcliffe Mystique story lets you know, again, that it's difficult being a woman in a man's world. The Boston photoessay lets you know, again, that Mount Vernon St. is paved with bricks and that Brahmins go to the Symphony. And the "Saturday-Night-Is-the-Loneliest-Night of-the-Week" mood piece lets you know, again, that young writers in their desire to be Relevant and Meaningful usually end up being pretentious. Oh, yeah, maybe you'll like it in 25 years.

yearbook is going to be successful it's going to have to drop this format which is based on obvious names, locations, and concepts. It's going to have to listen a lot more carefully to what people are talking about and thinking about. Its reporters and writers must start asking new questions and must learn to write to be read, lest they be superficial and inflated at the same time.