THE LARGER UNIVERSITY

A traditional Englishman visiting America left one of our small New England cities in disgust. He said they were having some sort of bally reunion and every hotel in the deuced place was so full of returning sons of the soil that a chap couldn't find room to sleep on the floor. He could not make anything out of it. Why should a man travel half across a continent to re-visit a town just because he happened to be born there?

Very much the same question might be asked about the University's alumni. What is there to draw graduates, busy men of affairs with no official connection with Harvard, as overseers, professors or members of the Corporation, not only to Class Day, but to meetings all over the country, to constant correspondence and discussion of University affairs? The answer is to be found only in a realization of what Harvard means.

Today, to a greater degree than ever before, Harvard belongs to the alumni and it is more than the hackneyed spirit of loyalty to Alma Mater that binds them together. They have a sense of proprietorship in a common enterprise, an interest in seeing it develop, and a mutual feeling of obligations to each other. The admission to the "fellowship of educated men" which goes with a bachelor's degree, was once lightly referred to as advantageous chiefly in entitling a man to membership in the New York Harvard Club. Certainly one of the greatest assets in graduation, which a man carries with him all through his life, is the association with other Harvard men.

More and more the alumni are coming to take an active hand in University life. The well-knit organization developed by the Associated Harvard Clubs and the Alumni Association throughout the country, and intensified by the Endowment Fund drive, tends to close up the gap between graduates and undergraduates which has existed more or less unconsciously in the past. The four years of undergraduate life are no longer the be-all and end-all, if ever they were. Today in graduating a man can look forward to as real a Harvard, as that he is leaving behind.