HOUSEPITALITY

A change in the House rules for entertaining guests would have to meet the complaints of over-strictness and over-complication. To harmonize with the general tendency at Harvard to treat undergraduates as mature persons, it would have to throw more responsibility on the individual student. This cannot be done by abolishing the parietal regulations in one fell swoop; the "honor system" can easily be carried too far, as Esquire's aggrieved females tell us each month. A suitable compromise might well be the Oxford card system, which was proposed in 1936 at the time when the "two-woman" rule was dropped. Under this scheme, a House member would simply sign in at the time he takes a guest to his room, and sign out when she leaves. There would be no chaperoning, no headaches about finding a tutor to grant permission ahead of time.

The lax enforcement of the letter of the law shows the need for a change on the statute books. The general rules as laid down by the University are "subject to interpretation" by masters and senior tutors, and consequently varying degrees of strictness have developed in different Houses. In one, a student simply signs a book for guests on Saturdays and Sundays, without having to obtain any official sanction; in another, permissions are dispensed with in practice; and in all Houses infringements by students of some or all of the rules are common. Uniformity cannot and should not crush out "states' rights" in the Houses, but a switch to the simpler, more sensible Oxford card system as the general principle would be a healthy reform.