Mr. Chairman!

"Since the financial emergency has a significance for Faculty and students not measurable in dollars and cents, the Committee emphatically recommends that the whole question be taken up and discussed in Faculty meeting." This is the crucial statement in the Council's report on the Budget Cut: For if the recommendation is not acted upon, the Administration's hard-headed business man's plan will go through without more than a side glance at the objections to it.

The unhappy situation of a reduced income had to be faced; no one has denied that. What was denied, first by the Teachers' Union, then by the Student Union, and finally by the Student Council, was that a flat ten per cent budget cut should be slammed down the throat of every Department in the University, with only the pious admonition to "injure educational standards as little as possible." According to the report, the tutorial system is being rapidly de-emphasied by the effects of the cut, and a Harvard education may become a watery sort of thing, at least "for the duration." Quite reasonably, the Council reiterated proposals for minimizing such an effect, and threw out a few more suggestions of its own.

The eight-page report was no all-inclusive summary of the detailed Departmental investigations, but it clearly pointed up the important issues. It could claim, too, to be representative of the student body as a whole when it called tutorial "the focal point of a liberal education," and when it warned that "in the mind of most undergraduates, Harvard would not be the same place without tutorial, in spite of its defects and its present state of flux." The same section fired a broadside at those who, to make room for immediate and useful technical training, would squeeze out the teaching of values which will be needed in the post-war world.

None of the alternatives to a full budget cut have been publicly analyzed and refuted by the Administration's. If there are reasons for rejecting them, a Faculty meeting would provide a good forum. If the tutorial system is going to have even a few holes blown in it, the Faculty might be interested to know why, though it meant sitting up two hours later with blue-books. It isn't too late.