The Harvard Union as a Social Centre.

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

My years are so many that I can boast of having been a personal friend and an occasional guest of Dr. Walker from whose lips I heard the prediction that "some time a commodious building would be donated to Harvard College as a Social Centre for all students, and instructors, and officers, and resident or visiting graduates, wherein everybody would seek to know everybody through informal and friendly conversations without regard to age, or class, or title, or vocational position."

Returning from a four years' absence in Europe to become a Cambridge resident, I find this prediction fulfilled so far as the donation of a commodious building is concerned; but to make a social Centre as Dr. Walker outlined it forty years ago, yet remains. I have spent the last two University years in Oxford where, after an absence of forty years, I was delighted to find the splendid new University Union buildings wherein such a spirit of social democracy was already prevailing that the old-timed distinctions and antagonisms which for centuries had made the Colleges like so many floating icebergs, were largely ignored and rapidly disappearing.

The prevalence of this same spirit of social democracy is now to be secured for Harvard University through the Harvard Union as a Social Centre. We are entering a Social Age in which all the snobbery and tom-foolery of stational and vocational bars to cordial social intercourse have become ridiculous and are being laughed out of existence. "A man is a man for a' that, for a' that!"

The main meaning and mission of the Harvard Union is to become a genuine Social Centre as outlined by Dr. Walker and as progressively illustrated by the University Union of Oxford. With this understanding of it, every loyal member of Harvard University whether student, instructor, officer, or alumnus should become a participating as well as a paying member of the Union. The building is not designed, primarily, as a place for study, or reading, or games, or lounging, or eating--for all of which abundant accommodations are provided elsewhere--but for seeking and cultivating the social element in the University life. To meet and greet, freely and cordially, whatever members may be found in or about the building and to become mutually interested in all the details of one another's studies and lives, without the necessity of a formal introduction or of an apology for introducing one's self should be the first, every-day rule of membership. Then, the better to cultivate this general sociability there should be one evening of each week during which the entire building should be used for Social Entertainments wherein all the instructors, officers, and alumni as well as students of the University should heartily participate. Such was the forecast of our venerable Dr. Walker and such, I am sure, was and is the desire of the benefactors through whom this admirable building and its furnishings have been secured to Harvard College. MARTIN KELLOGG SHERMERHORN.

(Graduate of Williams in class of 1865, and graduate student of various universities, including Harvard.