SPERRY GIVES WELCOME TO FOREIGN STUDENTS AT P. B. H. RECEPTION

The annual reception to foreign students of Harvard University, held yesterday afternoon at Phillips Brooks House, attracted a considerable number of students from other countries. After a few preliminary remarks in behalf of Phillips Brooks House by Peregrine White '33, chairman of the Foreign Students Committee for this year, the group was welcomed to Harvard by Dean Willard Learoyd Sperry of the Theological School.

In speaking of the differences that exist between students and people in general of the United States and other countries, Dean Sperry gave the standardization of our modern life in the United States as one of the chief causes of misunderstanding. Mentioning Thoreau and Emerson as typical of the movement towards individualism tht existed in New England a century ago, Dean Sperry appealed to the group to maintain this spirit at Harvard. The speaker gave Harvard as an example of a University not a corporate body, but an institution where many types of students are brought into contact with one another due to a lack of segregation which in some universities keeps men of one type by themselves.

Dean Sperry urged the students from other countries not to keep too closely with other students of their own country, and appealed to them to make the half-way approach to other nationalities that is necessary if friendships are to form. To Graduate School men in particular were the speaker's words of appeal that the men of higher academic pursuits in specialized subjects should not fall into the meta-tragic error of being born men, but of dying as physicists or physicians. Humanity must not suffer itself to be buried and dried up by the exhausting requirements of higher study, maintained Dean Sperry.

The group of students from countries outside the United States attending yesterday's meeting included students from Germany, Turkey, Belgium, Norway, England, Canada, Philippine Islands, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, China, Russia, and Austria. These students appeared unusually eager to make friends with Americans, to become acquainted with American home-life, and to meet and talk with American students, undergraduate and graduate, in the University.

The idea of the International Council found special favor with the group, and tthis informal discussion center on international problems will be started in the near future. The committee also hopes that members of the undergraduate body and of the faculty will make an attempt to meet some of the students from other countries, who often find the life at Harvard bewildering and difficult until contacts with American students and teachers are established.