FORMER PRESIDENT OF CRIMSON COMMENTS ON DAILY'S STATUS TODAY

To the list of commentators on the decay of the CRIMSON now is to be added the name of one of the paper's own presidents. W. I. Nichola '26, Assistant Dean of the University, who in an open letter to the Editor of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin expresses his views on the subject.

According to Dean Nichols, the CRIMSON is steadily, during the last ten years or so, running down hill, and is losing the support of its reading public, both graduate and undergraduate. Writing under the title "The Harvard CRIMSON Goes Professional", Dean Nichols lays the blame for the CRIMSON'S unpopularity on the "foul contagion of newspaper row" which he claims has invaded the Crimson Building on Plympton Street. As a contributing cause, he also mentions that the CRIMSON editors have become less and less affiliated with the other activities at Harvard.

So unpopular has the CRIMSON become in the eyes of some Harvard men, according to Dean Nichols, that already there are "whispered threatening of censorship, graduate control, and a University owned newspaper."

Praises News Columns

Dean Nichols cites as examples of the CRIMSON'S new-found professional spirit, a policy for "live news" and a tendency to promoting "stinks"--Which he defines as "any controversy the reverberations of which should be more than of local and momentary importance." He also mentions that gradually editors of the Harvard paper have taken up jobs as cub reporters on metropolitan dailies during the summer or have worked as college correspondents for these same papers, thus further bringing to the CRIMSON the professional standpoint.

"The results," says Dean Nichols, "of this new professionalism in the CRIMSON have been happier in the news columns than in the great editorial spaces". He praises the CRIMSON'S handling of the news and especially the paper's new features, such as its "confidential Guide to College Courses", but he criticizes the use of the "noxious euphemisms of the press": soccer players are invariably "booters", cross-country men, harriers", scholars, "savants". "But", says the latest commentator on Harvard's daily, "the standards of the CRIMSON'S news columns are as good as those of any metropolitan paper, and better than those of many of them."

Dislikes Editorials

It is in the CRIMSON editorials that the former CRIMSON editor and Rhodes scholar has the most fault to find; here it is that the professional atmosphere has done the most damage. "For", says Dean Nichols, "judgement, tact, good taste, discretion--all qualities essential to editorial columns are the qualities which develop only with age and experience. And it is not surprising that young men just turning twenty occasionally err in these respects. The unfortunate aspect of the situation is that in this day of far flung publicity those errors are flung broadeast through the country. And the graduates humiliated and ashamed and, perhaps, too, a little forgetful of their own youthful indiscretions, turn to the suggestion of graduate control for the CRIMSON as the quickest remedy for an undisputed evil."

To illustrate this "undisputed evil" Nichols cites several quotations from the editorial pages of last year's CRIMSON, among them, that paper's attack on the student employment burean, the University Band, and the English department.