DEAN HANFORD'S REPORT

In his annual report to President Lowell, Dean Hanford has included nothing radical. The House Plan and the depression continue to act as a spur to better scholarship among undergraduates; college costs have been reduced, and the amount of scholarship aids has been maintained relatively stable; the experiment of exempting seniors from hour examinations should be given further trial; and thee is the old land grave question of how many financially dependent students the College can absorb with benefit both to the institution and to the individual. Problems have arisen and have been met; throughout the whole there is a tone of complacent success which one associates with the annual reports of Harvard's executives.

But there is one unfortunate set of statistics which reveals that 36 percent of the dropped and readmitted Freshmen last year received unsatisfactory grades as compared to 13 percent of the new men who failed to meet the requirements. Of these, the readmitted men had much lower records than the same class of students in the scholastic year 1930-1931; and this in spite of the stricter requirements which enabled Dean Hanford to announce a definite improvement in his report last year.

There are two methods by which the records of readmitted men can be improved. The first of these is indicated in the present report. When determining the fitness of such men in the class of 1935, the administration has scrutinized with great care their previous records in school land college, in many cases has termed he summer school an inadequate test, and has reduced the number readmitted from 41 to 28. If these stricter requirements fall, there is the threat to exclude all save a few outstanding men whose University connections are severed at the end of their Freshman year.

All this restriction is doubtless necessary but the question of admission is at best a feeble half of the whole problem of the dropped and readmitted Freshmen. The failure of this year's stringent entrance policy may be due to an unavoidable fluctuation but most on servers feel that as long as these men are cooped together in Shepherd and Claverly Halls and are confronted with the obstacles of College indifference and group lassitude, that failure will be inevitable. There are patent signs in Dean Hanford's report, and in dean Leighton's supplementary suggestion for a more personal contact between Freshman adviser and advisee, that first year men have been temporarily relegated to the hinterland. There is certainly much to be done in this field; but it is of prime importance that if Freshmen with unsatisfactory records are to be readmitted they must be given a fair chance for scholastic rehabilitation. Their inclusion in the House Plan would not only be a just recognition of their mental needs and of the suitability of the House Plan to satisfy them, but would also insure a valuable revenue for an administration which finds it difficult to fill its rooms.