ASSAIL VICE IN BACK BAY STUDENT DISTRICT

The opening shots of a war against immorality and vice among students at men's and women's colleges in Boston were fired last night at a meeting of the Student Intercollegiate Committee on Student Living Conditions, held yesterday afternoon in the lecture room of the Boston Public Library.

Declaring that the students living in unsupervised quarters in Boston, especially in the Back Bay district, are subjected to serious moral temptations, the committee declared in its report that gambling, drinking, and loose living exist to a surprising degree in many students' rooming houses.

Appended to the report is a long list of suggestions, by which the committee hopes to remedy the present conditions. Among these are requests that the various colleges urge the police to be more strict in its attitude towards "street walkers, mashers, and drunkenness"; and that schools should provide rooming houses "in which only students of one sex should live".

Easy To Go Wrong, Says Report

"There is almost everything to help a student go wrong," the report declares, "and almost nothing to hinder him or her from going wrong. There are none of us who pose for moral reformers. There are none of us who are looking for the evil side of life, but enough has come to our attention to make us feel that some effort should be made to give the student as much encouragement to do right as to do wrong.

The group which listened to and approved this report yesterday consisted of one faculty and one student representative from many colleges in Greater Boston. Among the institutions represented were several departments of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, North Eastern University, Tufts College, and the Emerson College of Oratory.

The five Harvard representatives were Edward S. Emery '87, assistant comptroller of the University, Dr. George H. Wright '03 of the Harvard Dental School, Nathaniel Newman, a third year dental student, W. I. Nichols '26, and A. G. Cooke '26.

At the end of the meeting a smaller committee of five members was appointed to consider the report for curbing vice among Boston students, and taking definite actions on it in the near future.

Dr. Wright was named chairman of this committee, and his four assistants are Mrs. Lucy J. Franklin, dean of women at Boston University, Dean Stephen Rushmore of the Tufts Medical School. Donald Hooper, a student at M. I. T., and Nathaniel Newman of the University Dental School.

The report says in part:

"It is a well known fact among the student body of the present time that the living conditions in the students' area of Back Bay are far from what they should be; that the living conditions are far from what the faculties of the schools and the parents of the students would like to have them if they were aware of the conditions.

"It is common knowledge among the student body that temptations which are a detriment to the health, character, and efficient pursuit of studies are almost everywhere present among the students living in the area.

"In some of the rooming houses young men, and young women are, through force of circumstances, living with less protection from moral temptation than is desirable. It is known that in some places where men and women students live in the same house there is very lax supervision and that the frequenting of one another's rooms, both during the day and night, is not at all unheard of.