CONCENTRATION

The Confidential Guide of College Courses which the CRIMSON published at the opening of the college year last September was greeted in the editorial columns of the press with startled comment. The very idea that an undergraduate publication should admit the curriculum to its news columns, and particularly that it should admit it on the eve of the football season, appeared to commentators a most astounding, if not preposterous, departure from established policy. Ostensibly the established policy of an undergraduate publication was support of or at least interest in everything except the essential work for which men came to college.

In this radical departure, the CRIMSON was said to be "hazarding" an enterprise which was termed as "extraordinary" with an exclamation point. One editorial in its opening paragraph enlightened its readers that the CRIMSON had not perpetrated a joke, but rather was "intensely in earnest".

No such outburst will greet the undergraduate articles on concentration, port of which appear in the news columns of today's issue and the rest of which will be published tomorrow. The public is slowly coming to realize that Harvard students are sincerely interested in their job, are consequently studying it in systematic fashion, are strongly inclined against timidity in speaking their minds, think with reasonable perspicacity, and express themselves with a certain amount of perspicuity. It is interesting to note that in the forty-six issues which the CRIMSON published between September 24 and November 21 the date of the Harvard Yale football game; in other words in the papers published during the football season, twenty of the leading editorials were on strictly educational subjects, and but twelve on athletics.

Perhaps more than anything else, the Report of the Student Council Committee on Education has made the following newspaper statement approach actuality: "The college of the future, judging by present tendencies, will be decidedly cooperative, with the students sharing control". The report ranks with that of Dartmouth as being the most able document produced by undergraduates in this country. Conclusively it proves that the opinion of the student is valuable.

And so, in publishing articles by undergraduates on the various fields of concentration, the CRIMSON is now merely following a precedent set by students of the University the entire year. The articles are not meant to be the outburst of stifled students; men at Harvard have no need for such resources. They are not intended to represent or promote III feeling between teacher and student; rather they should help in achieving the other extreme. To present the undergraduate reaction in each of the more important fields of concentration is the sole purpose of these articles. Tomorrow the Freshmen will listen to President Lowell explain the teachers' attitude; the CRIMSON presents the students' point of view.