"WHERE CAN I GET A ROOM?"

From eight in the morning until six in the evening an almost continuous procession of new students apply at the Phillips Brooks House Information Bureau during the two weeks previous to the opening of college. By far the greater number come there for only one purpose,--to in uire for rooms. Many of them have just arrived in Cambridge and have not the slightest idea where they can spend even their first night.

The Bureau meets the demands of these men for whom there is no place in the dormitories by supplying them with printed lists of boarding houses in Cambridge and giving personal advice when it is possible. These lists are compiled from cards sent out during the summer to the many landladies of Cambridge. The Phillips Brooks House is doing a real service to new students by helping them in this way. It is a service, however, for which the college office should properly be responsible. First, because helping students to get rooms should not be regarded as within the scope of a philanthropic organization; and secondly, because the Phillips Brooks House has neither the money nor the personnel to do the work efficiently or adequately. One has only to serve for a short time at the Information desk to realize wherein the present room service falls. A Freshman, not over seventeen, obviously away from home for the first time and a stranger to Cambridge asks where he can find a room. Sometimes in the rush hours a printed list is put in his hand; sometimes a few houses on that list are checked off for him as being in desirable localities. There are several hundred private houses on the list; almost without exception practically nothing is known about the lodging house at which your Freshman may apply. It may be disreputable or unhealthy. And that is the last that is heard of him. Allowing a man liberty is one thing; this is downright neglect that is very nearly criminal.

We read in an editorial from the Penn State college paper a complaint that new students on arrival were given no other accommodation than a cot on the amory floor. That is considerably better treatment than is accorded a large portion of the students at Harvard.

What is really needed, of courses are new dormitories; in the absence of these there should be conducted by the University an adequate room registry office where there will be means of checking up on the lodging houses. An office of this kind could make some such arrangement as the Business School made this year; it could take an option on enough rooms to take care of the overflow from the Charles River dormitories, thereby making it possible to assign rooms to all Freshmen except those who enter after the fall examinations.

It is easy enough to devise some means of spending the University's money and suggestions enough are offered on that point. But conducting such a Bureau as we have suggested would not involve any great expenditures. One capable executive with two clerks could handle easily the work necessary. The situation at present is intolerable; with ever increasing enrolment it will become more so, if that were possible. If we cannot take care of new students, their number should not be allowed to increase.