PRO PATRIA

With Patriot's Day just around the corner, the student not on the Dean's List is compelled to regard its advent with some apathy. He whom the Fates frowned on at the midyears has long since received a neatly printed notice from the Dean's Office reminding him that due to his failure to maintain a B average he must be particularly careful not to cut classes around holiday time. The implied threat is the big stick of probation for the feckless undergraduate who is careless enough to bid defiance to University Hall on this momentous question by slipping down to Wellesley or Smith on pleasure bent and returning beyond the deadline of his first class.

For those who are just scraping through, the institutions of probation and attendance at classes have at least some justification for existence, but forbidding cuts at vacation time when they are freely allowed even to the non-honor student at other times comes under the head of nuisance legislation. No doubt the idea behind this system is that it serves to reenforce the attractiveness of the Dean's List by granting material concessions to honor men. But the abolition of compulsory attendance has rendered even this feeble encouragement completely obsolete. Whatever may be the attitude next year of the authorities toward revising probation and attendance at classes, it is to be hoped that restrictions of no obvious value around vacation and holiday times will be relegated to the scrap-heap.