A Groan From the Pit

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Institutions are known to have the vices or virtues of traditions implicit in them. Given the institution of divisional examinations for the graduating classes of Harvard, we must expect to find that as a concordia discors there will spring up the tradition of railing against them as so much unnecessary inhibition, as so much of that traumatic stuff which Freud would assure us will bother the graduates for the remainder of his celibate or marital existence--chiefly the latter, for it is a sorry truism, known even to a Freshman, that man gives hostages to fortune in monogamy, and even in polygamy. . . . But we digress. What we meant to say was that in this communication to the CRIMSON we were only acting up to the tradition of lamenting the institution of divisional examinations for Seniors. The early siege of Spring will partly excise this early lament. But you may rest assured that we are merely starting the ball (or "bawl") rolling, and that from now on there will be a flood of such Senior sonneteering.

But again, to the point. . . These posteclipse days are providing some sad food for thought to the Senior class in Harvard. To all intents and purposes, the class of 1925 individually and collectively, are busied with accumulating the intellectual riff-raff of four years of study in the different fields of concentration. Actually, if our mentors would but understand us, there is going on in the "divided psyches" of these young men, thinking which is far afield from these supposed endeavors. Your Senior, if at all given to thinking, is already chafing under the hard task-master, the May examinations. He remembers that some of Harvard's finest "illustri"--Emerson, for example, and Thoreau keeping himself in the pink of condition waiting for something to turn up and Henry Adams with his cloquent disenchantment in his "Education", and Roosevelt, and John Reed, and Walter Lippman and a host of others--he remembers that these men were all given to an internal species of question and wonderment as to what four years of undergraduate life could possibly have meant to them Thinking along similar lines, the Senior likewise begins to rebel a bit. After three and one-half years in studies which by no means represented his free choice, he begins to see that now if ever should he be given his chance to overstep the checks and restraints of curricular study, and to give his near-approaching seniority or maturity the benefit of a self-realization campaign. To this end, how happy the free-lancing in such promising courses which he had never before been able to take, not even with the supposed liberality of that misnomer "distribution" system operative--courses like the "Philosophic Systems of India", the "Intellectual History of Europe from 500-1500", the "Intellectual and Social History of the United States"--"These United States"--

The Senior could profit by an expansion of interest in his Senior year it never before. College for the first time begins to mean something to him in broad perspective. Perspective of any sort is a real accomplishment. Usually your young man has to wait until he gets out of college to begin to see the thing clear and to see it whole. Probably this is the aim of our educators, although it is sadly unwise. And so what boots it anyhow to have anticipated this intellectual robustness in his Senior year? He must suffer the division of tastes and tasks. The dream of mature planning of his education must perish. He must still be the boy with punitive tasks to perform, and "divisionals" keep dividing him against himself. Thus conscience, someone has said, doth make cowards of us all: but the Senior is not altogether blameworthy. Conscience begins to mean nothing else than an institution in this case the institution of "divisionals".

This is its "irony" This is the academic forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemolcks and the Seniors. Biologically, spiritually and humanly, it amounts to another prolonged dose of suicide. The myth of a liberal college is still supposed to persist despite this fact. Most of us shall leave Cambridge, sheepskin, honors, keys at also, we shall carry with us a smile for these hypocritic days: also a pretty little chip on our shoulders. If this be error and upon me proved . . . Irwin Rosen '26.