THE DECLINE OF THE TEST

Harvard is out of joint today; the fabric of its society threatens to give at the seams. It is a strange time of year--this exam period, when for once the students work while the Faculty plays. Along the Charles the windows light up quickly as darkness comes, and hands reach up to pull the shades, then fall back to turning the pages. Blue books are every day laid in neat little piles, A--M and N--Z, as if on a sacrificial altar. Alarm clocks jangle so early that they scare the mice back into their holes. Extra chairs are brought into the libraries, and the book return service does a rushing business. It is a picture that might interest a Pareto or a Spengler, the spectacle of a society under stress.

Some day maybe the guns of the Sociology Department will be trained on the exam period. After the manner of this tribe, they may find that Harvard is now in an idealistic age, whereas during the rest of the term its culture is sensate. They will surely take note of Harvard's sharply stratified society, the two great classes, students and Faculty. They will say, "During the exam period the relationship of these two strata of society undergoes its profoundest change." It is strange they haven't thought of making such a study before this. From the sociologist's standpoint, it has everything.

If men are ever completely in the toils of social forces, they are now. On Sunday eager students turn their steps to Widener, and retreat, bitterly frustrated, when they find it closed. "Cases of neurosis increase by about five per cent during the exam period," so the report will go. It is a time like the Reformation, when fundamentals are questioned. And why not, with all the rotogravures turning out pictures of Miami bathing beauties? Or with proctors in the exams dangling their Phi Beta Kappa keys before the eyes of the students?

But what comfort is there for the undergraduates, who are the immediate sufferers? Not for years at least will they have the benefit of a detached analysis of the forces that are wracking them. And when it does come, there probably won't be any need for it. Meantime they will suffer in silence, and keep on huddling in cold little groups in the lee of Memorial Hall: "Jeest, I thought at least there'd be some choice. Now what did you say on that third question?. . ."