THE WORM TURNS

Today's petition originating among students of music asking the University to provide them with library facilities in Paine Hall, the music building, is the voice of a long suffering people crying aloud in the wilderness.

The demand is already long overdue. It deserves the support of all men who have endured the humiliation of shuttling between Paine and Widener in search of music hopelessly divided between the two buildings; or who have failed even to obtain a glimpse of music whose habitat is known. For the Paine Hall "library" is often so overcrowded that no chairs or tables remain free, and the Janus of the door to the Widener stacks refuses free access to undergraduates.

To begrudge the Physics department across the way from Paine Hall their ten odd electric water coolers for drinking fountains might be thought unkind by the S. P. C. A. But to the average mind, it does seem at least strange that a building with such crass luxuries should rub elbows with the physical poverty of a distinguished, if small, department like Music. The petition, printed on page one today, does not exaggerate the handicap that the present hole of a library offers to undergraduates and graduate alike. It totally neglects to state that a large part of all the scores and individual compositions are not catalogued in Widener. And so the undergraduates, whose only means of getting acquainted with a wide variety of music is to browse at liberty among the books, beat a futile tattoo against the untold yards of red tape that bar the Widener stacks.

When Harvard students so far overcome their famed indifference that they rise up and shout for reasonably accessible surroundings in which to do efficient work, it behooves the University to examine their requests. When it finds out how just is the demand, it can do no less than acceed, and move the whole music collection to Paine Hall.