SELF SERVICE

More evidence, if more is needed, that the undergraduate at Harvard is becoming also, and primarily, a student, may be drawn from the serious decline this year in the number of men who have reported for social service at the Phillips Brooks House. Descending from a peak of over four hundred in 1921 to half that amount last year, the number dropped this fall, according to Mr. McTurnan, the social service secretary, to 160 men. Despite all that has been done to interest students in work that is said to pay richly in human experience, the thirty-five settlement houses in Boston and Cambridge which depend to a great extent upon Harvard for their volunteer workers are handicapped by a lack of men.

It is, perhaps, to be regretted that the cultural and religious training of a still younger generation hereabouts must suffer through the failure of the student body to give sufficient response to the appeal of the Brooks House. But to the demands of nearly all the extracurricular activities, with the significant exception of the theatre, the opera, and the buying of books, has the response been similarly passive. And the conditions which are responsible for this seeming apathy can hardly be regretted, for they are the vindication of scholastic independence. If the answer to the call of the Phillips Brooks House has been largely that of echo, it is not an echo engendered in the vast purlieus of an empty reading room: if the Harvard undergraduate is refusing to teach the youth of the slums, all that can be deplored is his selfishness in preferring to learn himself.