PRESIDENT LOWELL DENIES COLLEGE WILL SHUT GATES

President Lowell, in a statement made public, denies all rumors that the University will discontinue next year. This announcement, which was made to the Alumni Bulletin, emphatically says that the College will proceed next September in its activities and operation as formerly.

The case of France is cited, where young men are urged to pursue their customary studies until the age for military instruction is reached.

The statement by President Lowell follows in full:

"Rumors seem to have got abroad in some places that Harvard College will shut its gates next year, or at least will not devote itself to the ordinary process of education. If such rumors merit contradiction they may not only be contradicted, but repudiated, for the College would be unworthy of its traditions and its endowment if it ceased to carry on its proper work at a crisis like the present. The Freshman Halls, like all the other dormitories and academic buildings, will be open as usual, and the activities, especially of the freshman class, will go on without change.

"This country will need educated men no less during and after this war than it has needed them before. If education, not specifically directed to military use is a mere luxury, enabling men to find a source of relaxation and enjoyment, but not essential to the welfare of the community as a whole, then the College had better close its doors permanently. But if, on the other hand, education in the manifold forms in which it is given by the various institutions of learning, is essential to modern civilization and to the United States, then the College certainly cannot cease to impart it.

"France, which, on the side of the Allies, has borne by far the heaviest part in the war, has insisted that her young men should pursue their ordinary courses of study until they came to the age for beginning military instruction. We cannot do better than follow that example.

"Our young people are a little too prone to mistake excitement for duty. The outbreak of the war naturally makes people a little excited, but this is a time when every man and boy should have a more than usually keen sense of duty, should not allow excitement or exuberance of patriotism to deter him from performing to the best of his ability the obligations that lie before him; and until the age or the opportunity of rendering real military or other service arrives, the duty of the boy or young man is to train himself to clear thought, to steady application, and to persistent purpose. The college course is designed to furnish these things; and the only difference in the feeling that a young man should have about college in these days is a stronger determination to make the most of the opportunities it affords, to take his studies at school or college more seriously, and more with the object, as a citizen, of making them ultimately profitable to the nation.