INDIFFERENCE

By way of commenting on the cold shoulder that Harvard men ordinarily turn towards "student movements", a national youth leader recently pointed out that the traditional spirit of indifference in Cambridge is the direct result of academic freedom. In pinning on liberty of thought the failure of undergraduates to rise and riot for more serious subjects than Richard, the expert in youth movements has struck to the core of the matter. For although other factors contribute to the Harvard man's seeming lack of interest in the world about him, the priceless heritage of freedom, for which the college for generations has carried the banner, is the undoing of serious-minded group agitation in the Yard.

Bred in an atmosphere of tolerance and infused with the Emersonian doctrine of self-reliance, the student in Cambridge tends to build about himself a crustaccous shell, when it comes to participating in group agitation. Yet in a college where each member, student and faculty alike, is left free to pursue his given task and no official thought is paid to caste, creed, color, or previous condition of servitude, the average Harvard man finds it hard to see just what he can really agitate about. Student publications, for instance are not victimized by political censorship, such as "The Daily Texan" has had planted over its presses by local sulphur-mining interests. Faculty councils have not been bothered by dismissals, right or wrong, like the Davis case at Yale, University officials have not been pained by hot-headed and emotional strife such as Burke, however justifiably, stirred up at Columbia. In short, Harvard has gone about its business in peace and quiet, its cloisters untainted by the breath of civil war.

Nevertheless, the outwards shown of indifference for which the college is notorious betrays an in ward lack of interest in the pulse of contemporary affairs. The even tenor of Harvard ways has lulled the undergraduate to a sense of false security quite out of keeping with the spirit abroad in the world today. For it takes a tremendous force to rouse Harvard men to the core, and thrills such as the trumpet call of the Further War Veterans and the more serious mood which drew men to the Teacher's Oath hearing only show that Harvard's own toes must be trod on before screams will issue forth from the student body. In many respects it is in the tendency to mind their own business and not concern themselves with the affairs of others that Harvard men differ from the average run of college students in America, but it is a tendency more of inertia than of the interest in life that college should engender. But just as long as the spirit of academic freedom pervades the Yard, the traditional indifference seems an inevitable part of the Harvard picture.