The General

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters, but under special conditions, at the request of the writer, names will be withheld.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

The discussion Professor Rollins's examination started concerns something more than English 72. There is a similar dissatisfaction with the English department in general, and it may not be inapropos at this particular moment to comment upon the situation.

Professors of art have indeed a great responsibility, and when uninspired scholarship and casualness take the place of enthusiastic interest and brilliant appreciation they are open to the severest censure and condemnation. To many, the English Department has taken on that character to a decided degree in the past few years. It is a pity that one cannot be brutally frank and use names; but when one of the "promising young instructors" tells you that it is his "job" to lecture and that it is not his or anybody else's business how his audience responds to him, and, consequently, literally talks to the ceiling to convince you and himself of the impersonal role he is playing, it is a travesty on education and an insult to the art which he professes (or should profess) to interpret. And when another young man, a professor in this case, reads the warmest poetry in the language "vulgarly" (as a discriminating Frenchman in the graduate school put it) not to say uninspiredly and unappreciatively,--that is a transgression and torturing abuse of "things conceived in the blood and passion of the heart". To many Harvard men the English Department has been reduced to a group of definitive and meticulous scholars for the training of Ph.D.s who have failed, for the most part, to reach the undergraduate and who, in the maxe of sheer quantitative labor, have lost hold of the soul of their subject and of their audiences whose duty it is, at least, to interest.

There seems to be a silent policy which is so shaping the English Department and which is also affecting the other departments of the University. It seems to be a growing conservatism, a fear of publicity, and an apprehensiveness of powerful personalities and minds especially (since the war) when they are of certain foreign extractions. A great deal of this is undoubtedly justified so far as the selection of students is concerned, but in it also lies the evil which earlier forced Munsterberg and Santayana to resign and which more recently caused the withdrawal of Baker and MacDougall. And now, since the Sacco-Vanzetti case, there is an antagonism in the Law School against Frank-furter. Why should not a professor bring his knowledge to bear upon matters of public and human interest? The result has been, (as most obviously seen in the English and Philosophy Departments) that the qualifications for advancement on the Faculty have been reduced to a tea-drinking respectability and academic propinquity which must needs exclude robust personalities and original minds with the zeal, ardor and conviction necessary to instill into young blood a respect and admiration for knowledge and a desire to pursue it for its own sake. Sydney Hubert Blackstone '26.