Harvard's Policy.

The following extracts are taken from a letter to the Boston Post, criticizing the recent action of the Board of Overseers:-

"The action of the overseers of Harvard University at their meeting on Wednesday will strike a great number of the recent graduates as an unfortunate retrograde movement. During the twenty years, more or less, in which President Eliot has occupied his position, there has been steady progress in the direction of placing greater reliance on the individual student and less upon a vexatious code of rules and penalties.

"All these measures have been steps toward a goal which all must acknowledge to be desirable of attainment. All have marked the change form the narrow atmosphere and petty restrictions of a school in which the result is to extract from the pupil a fixed amount of work and exact from him a strict obedience to a body of minute regulations, to the broad life of a true university, in which great privileges are offered to those who will avail themselves of them, while in return each student is required to conform himself to such regulations only as are necessary for the maintenance of order and of honor and to satisfy his instructors that he is making a reasonable use of his opportunities.

"From year to year as this development has steadily progressed under the guidance of President Eliot, its moving spirit, it has been observed that those who were in a position to note the effect of the changes were unanimous, or nearly so, in the opinion that a great improvement was being wrought. No signs have appeared of any deterioration in the quality or quantity of work done.

"As regards the great body of undergraduates the reforms have been received as they were offered; here as elsewhere responsibility has had its educating effect, and the student who formerly regarded it as his duty to take the full number of 'cuts' permitted without punishment, under the new regime loses the desire to absent himself.

"That a return should now be threatened from the present system which those college officers best qualified to judge have pronounced a success, to the old one that has been tried and found wanting; that Harvard should deliberately retrace its steps, and from the university revert to the kindergarten, is a disappointment and a humiliation."