TO EAT, AND FOR LOVE

Supplementary to the suggestion of the Student Council that commuters be given entrance as paying guests to House dining halls, it is only reasonable that Freshmen have the same privileges. Just as upperclassmen, they should be allowed, on the invitations of their friends, to take three meals a week outside their own commons, and to sign for them.

In their case the arrangement would be more than a social amenity. It would afford them practical openings to view their prospective residences more or less from the inside, and thus to make their final choice of House with a clearer eye than that of mere prejudice and untimely bias. A Freshman inter-House eating prerogative would moreover give much encouragement to friendships between upperclassmen and first-year men, which could be of essential benefit, but which are scarcely flourishing at the present. Certainly, under the wide aegis of the House Plan, the dinner table has come to be a focus of social life and the chief occasion of leisure in the student's day; its advantages ought to be extended to include the Freshman, and to connect him as permanently as possible with those he may meet or chance to know in the higher classes. Just as the introduction of inter-House eating practically re-made the social relationships of upperclassmen, a parallel change, as here suggested, would greatly widen and enrich the Freshman sphere of activity. Chiefly by bringing such influences to bear in the very first year, can the still evident class lines in the Houses be broken down.

This innovation would do no harm to the corporate House life; it would simply, as the inter-House privilege did, make it more eclectic. It is a right and inevitable corollary of the University's past policy.