BEER IN THE HOUSES

In applying for a license to serve malt beverages in the house dining halls, the University has acted with exemplary promptness and vigour. What the Massachusetts legislature's twenty-one year age limit had left possible, the University has done. But the principal value of its action will be in bringing to a head, and in making efficient, the opposition which exists to the twenty-one year limit itself.

For it would be difficult to imagine any situation more undesirable than the arbitrary internal division which the enforcement of an age limit will make necessary. The responsibility which the university assumes to see that no one under twenty-one sits at the reserved tables means, in practice, that the dining hall management must set up a card system for admission to them, and that this system will be administered by the hostess and waitresses, with the Cambridge police in the offing. It means, further, that the house will divide along age lines, which are not the lines that dining hall comradeship always follows. The tutors, for instance, who are just beginning to enter the life of the house, and the graduate students, will be segregated from the bulk of the undergraduates at meals; the battle which the house plan waged against the tutor's tables will have to be fought once again, and on more difficult lines.

Many will think it open to question that the unity of the houses, and the assimilation of graduates and tutors into them, are no more important than the presence of beer. There may be tutors so dedicated to the success of the house plain that they will sacrifice their new privilege, but the record of the tutors' tables, of their healthy life and stubborn, imposed death, indicates that such tutors are in the minority. The graduate students, whose interest is less direct, cannot be expected to eschew beer at meals in the tutorial cause; the bulk of undergraduates over twenty-one will tend to follow their example. In this manner beer will divide the houses, and in so dividing them it will assume a vast and obvious importance to which its own merit would never entitle it.

But the situation will be so disagreeable, and its implications so unintelligent, that the student body will not tolerate it long. Their target, which has been the University, is now the Massachusetts Legislature, and they must address that target with force and diligence. A concession might be made in the form of the stronger malt beverages, of porter and ale, but the limit itself must be reduced to eightees years. Not only the convenience of the marginal group is involved, but also that necessity for same and enforceable law upon which so much of the repeal propaganda itself was based.