What We Shall See

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters but under special conditions, at the request of the writer, names will be withheld.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

The advisability of a subdivision of Harvard College, which the House plan is designed to effect, is no longer a matter of pertinence. I believe, however, that the basis of the new division, of greater importance than the mere fact of division itself and unlike it not irrevocable, will still bear careful consideration.

According to official announcement each of the new Houses will contain an approximate cross section of the college. That is each House will have its fair share of the athletic and the academic, of the literary, the scientific, and the historical. Diversity rather than unity of interest among the occupants of a House will thus be the guiding aim.

What goal will such a grouping of students serve to approach? Any intelligently directed educational institution will, I believe, confess as its fundamental aim the encouragement of intellectual activity and the increase of intellectual power among its students. Its social structure should be planned or altered with this underlying intellectual purpose in mind. The House plan, as it is at present conceived, obviously will tend to throw students into contact with all types of their associates. It may even succeed in giving them a certain social breadth which they would not obtain under any other system; though here one well may doubt if the stubbornly dissimilar social elements of which Harvard is composed can be fused even in an especially prepared crucible.

But the more important question of what intellectual end such a melting pot will serve still remains to be answered. It will patently no more foster an atmosphere of common intellectual effort than the present system, since the intent is to prevent any large concentration of men working on the same subjects. We must then assume that diversity of intellectual appreciation, like breadth of social experience, is the object of the House plan. In other words it is expected that an art student, a mathematician, a football player, and a CRIMSON editor will gather informally in the new Houses and each impart his special knowledge toward the common edification. The smallest experience of student gatherings and student conversation ought sufficiently to reveal the visionary character of such an expectation. What will happen in the chance gatherings of the new Houses will be exactly like what happens in any present chance undergraduate gathering: sports, sex, the latest political scandal, examination grievances and the like will be the topics of conversation and any mention of history, painting, or chemistry will be banned as shop talk. As concerns education Harvard will not be the least bit richer than it is today.

The alternative to the present House plan scheme would be to have men of similar academic tastes live together. This would not necessarily entail an arbitrary assignment of men according to designated fields of concentration; by grouping history tutors in one House and fine arts tutors in another, for instance, these Houses could be given distinctive characters which would attract to them students inclined toward their specialties. All the men who were working in the same field would have a chance to be in frequent communication with each other, an intellectual atmosphere and intellectual discussions would, thus provided with a basis of common interest and knowledge, tend to develop. Some even of the professedly non-students might be drawn into the vortex by mere proximity to it.

It will be said that such a scheme would lead to specialization and narrowness. To a certain extent this objection is valid, though a wide variety of types, both social and intellectual, are certainly represented among the students who are following any broad field of knowledge. But it is difficult to see how active intellectual curiosity can be aroused among undergraduates, naturally tending toward diffusion of effort, without some specification, and consequently narrowing, of interest. Alan R. Sweezy '29.