The Past is Still With Us

Modern language concentrators have been surprised and pained to find that in spite of the trying twelve-week summer session they must soon broil through, they are apparently expected to take the September Bible-Shakespeare-Ancient Authors examination, which is based on summer reading. This examination could be given in all justice in the past, when to most students summer was a glorious period of loafing, with plenty of time for casual study. Now this September examination is an anachronism, a pointless holdover which should be eliminated in view of the new accelerated summer program.

The Bible-Shakespeare-Ancient Authors examination was instituted some twenty years ago because it was obvious that no student of modern languages should be allowed to graduate from Harvard without reading representative selections from the world's greatest literature. In fact, a considerable number of Faculty members felt and still feel that all men who attend the College should be able to present evidence of having read these classics. Present chemistry and physics concentrators do not know how close they have been to taking the examinations along with the modern language men to prevent their becoming one-sided. Even now, the University's reluctances to allow its members to go all out for science is reflected in the projected course in Great Authors.

Granting, then, the desirability of knowing these authors, it is still, plain that the September Authors examination should not be given when a majority of the men tested will have spent a busy summer here in the College. Whether the field should be covered in tutorial or in some omnibus Authors course is an entirely separate consideration--the fact remains that the September examination should be recognized for the rest of the war like the leisurely four-year program, as a thing of the past.