Virtue on the Half Shell

September 29, 1936

IN ITS NEW regulation concerning the entertainment of women in the Houses, the University has relapsed a long way toward the bigoted puritanism which it has been trying to disown for many years.

The requirement that women friends of students must enter the Houses in groups or not at all is an unwarranted display of paternalism on the part of University Hall, ridiculous in its conception and a nuisance in its effect. The history of Harvard social life during the five years of the House plan gives no excuse for such Pinkerton tactics, while the regulation itself points the finger of suspicion at every young lady who has ever been entertained unchaperoned within Harvard walls.

By what curious process of thinking did University Hall come to the conclusion that vice walks unattended or virtue walks in pairs?...The irony of the situation lies in the fact that such petty annoyances are put in the way of students, while the normal requirements of decency, such as preventing loose-women from walking into the Houses at three in the morning, are allowed to lapse by an incompetent staff.

If past experience carries any weight, scandal at Harvard had been more restricted than a university of this size has any right to expect. The decency of most of the young ladies attending Harvard functions, along with a happy regard for the "time-and-place-for-that-sort-of-thing" doctrine, has kept the social life here in better taste than that of any other university of comparable size and diversity....

In the fall of 1936, the University instituted a new rule for bidding a woman from visiting a House without another woman, provoking The Crimson's vehement protest. In its denunciation of the new (and soon-to-be-repeated) policy, however, The Crimson did not challenge the University's role in enforcing morality; it went without question that the University would, in addition to educating its students, instill "virtue" in them.