THREE TO GET READY

Efforts are again on foot to bring home to the Senior the fact that he is soon to become an alumnus. The usual committee is getting up steam and all that is needed now is a few passengers. And there of course is the rub, men in college refuse of take much thought for the future. The present is too engrossing, the future, hazier perhaps that it ought to be, is vaguely understood to be full of various unpleasantnesses which will be sad enough when encountered. Most undergraduates have a shrewd suspicion that alumni associations exist for the purpose of collection debts incurred in happier days and they have not yet arrived at the stage where an annual dinner or weekly luncheon holds the essence of the glory that was college.

Inescapable is the fact that students are not alumni, that their conception of their alma mater is far from what is will be when they come back for their twenty, fifth. Anyone who has occasion to talk over Harvard matters with a group of old grads will testify to the difficulty of bringing the discussion to considerations of discernible importance. And the alumni are no doubt as baffled to understand the lack of sympathy with which they are met by those who are living the best years of their lives.

Harvard is famous for the fact that her student body is the most indifferent and her alumni the most cohesive and enthusiastic band of persons to be met with in collegiate circles. This change takes place, at the earliest, after three years of absence from the Yard and it is ladle to try and speed up a development which has all the symptoms of a natural process. Those devoted to collecting the back debts of the University would do well to admit the paradox and refrain from killing by forced cultivation a plant that will shortly grow to luxuriant productivity by itself.