Alors!

To The Editors of The Crimson:

Crossing the Yard the other day, I stooped to pick up one or two of the tin cans and papers that lay in the path I was following. As I straightened up and went on my way, I overheard a little knot of French visitors who had been watching me with amazement. They stared for a minute at me and then at the rectangles of ragged grass, with their uprooted palins and their usual scatteration of papers, bottles, and plastic wrappers smeared with remnants of junk food "Tiens!" exclaimed one of the women. "It's democracy in action. The Americans may be slobs, but at least they're ingenious enough to make the professors clean up the premises."

It would be unjust to look to the professors--or even to the personnel of Buildings and Grounds--to redress the slovenliness of Harvard's plant, and especially of the poor bedragled Yard. Those who scream loudest about the environment usually care about their own collectivity, and wire barriers and trash gardens and lawns of Oxford and Cambridge.

Perhaps the Yard is only another symptom of over-expansion: might it not be that the University has become the Cosmopolis of Spengler, a huge petrifact, whose inhabitants view it exclusively as the instrument of their individual advancement or pleasure? In that event, it would be useless to expect anyone to concern himself with a matter so marginal as the beauty of the institution itself. John Bovey '35