HARVARD INDIFFERENCE

The accusation of Harvard indifference has been so bandied about since time immemorial that it has achieved almost a national reputation. Exclusive, unfriendly, and Bourbon, Harvard in the eyes of its critics is goodless and very nearly Godless.

As always there is a reverse to the medal. To Harvard men and to some few others at least, Harvard indifference is really Harvard manifoldness or Harvard individualism a philosophy of live and let live, freedom of thought and speech and action carried to the furthest reasonable limit. And so those who believe in Harvard and its ideals make a virtue out of the very thing which the critics paint as the darkest vice.

But there is a type of indifference which can not be justified on any grounds--least of all those of individualism. Indifference to need and suffering has never been characteristic of Harvard in the past and can not be so in the future.

The Student Friendship Fund Drive, to be conducted next week under the auspices of the Student Council must appeal particularly to all students and to all Harvard men--to the former because it is for the relief of destitute students in Europe and to the latter because Harvard, almost alone among all the great colleges of the East, has not yet had an opportunity to contribute to such a cause. Approved by Ex-president Wilson, Secretary Hoover and many of the greatest religious and educational leaders of the country, who serve on its Advisory Committee, the organization has been carrying on relief work for several years in central and eastern Europe. The possibility of education, the only remaining barrier in parts of Europe to chaos and a new barbarism, has been kept alive in many cases only by means of the work of the Student Friendship Fund, representing the donations and labor of the students of almost all the nations of the world.

In this country Yale and Princeton, to mention only two of the great universities of the East, have this year and in the past contributed generously to the Fund. Only those who are irreconcilably committed to the fetish of Harvard indifference believe that the University will not do likewise.