INTERSECTIONAL DEBATE

The CRIMSON feels that it is speaking for all Harvard in welcoming the announcement that Leland Stanford University will send a debating team to compete at Cambridge on January 6; Debates with Oxford and Cambridge have become frequent but up to the present no concerted effort has been made to arrange for intersectional meetings of the same character. The CRIMSON hopes that the debate with Stanford will be followed by many others with representatives of colleges and universities in the South and West.

This is a type of intersectional competition which has all the purported advantages and none of the disadvantages of east-west and north-south football games. International debating is neither an advertising medium nor a gladiatorial spectacle. It is tainfed with neither professionalism nor commercialism. It is a meeting of keen wits from different parts of the country on common ground. In a more limited sphere it serves the same purpose as international debating, that of wider understanding.

Attacking a different problem, Woodrow Wilson once said, "these boys are bound together in all their social relationships but have no intellectual ties . . . the ties of fellowship, the ties of membership, the center of it all should be an intellectual thing." This is the fundamental fault in most intercollege relationships. They are fraternal in the emotional sense, or athletic or sentimental, but seldom based on the community of the mind. Here lies the importance of intersectional debating, the Student Federation, and other fundamentally intellectual relationships in the collegiate world.