Where It Cuts Most

Simultaneous with today's report from University Hall, that cutting of classes will be dealt with more harshly in the future, the entire student body is expected to cry out in defense of one of its most cherished liberties. But the rights of the undergraduates are not being needlessly trampled on, nor is an evil genius trying to return the Harvard student to the state of regimentation that he had hoped to escape after graduating from high school. The conditions that made leniency towards class attendance possible and advisable in the past have almost totally disappeared and with them, the former policy must go.

In the late twenties, during the rise of the tutorial system the University dropped much of its former severity on class attendance, believing that time spent with a tutor might be more profitable than the attendance of a routine lecture. Now, tutorial is conducted more like a class than an individual conference and those few tutors who are left are rapidly disappearing into war work or the armed forces themselves. The second reason, paradoxically enough, is more directly bound up with the students' welfare. If an undergraduate has not attended a course regularly up to the time of his abrupt departure for the Army or Navy, his cumulative grade would be so poor that he could not be given final credit for the course.

Moreover, instructors have complained more about poor attendance this year than ever before and midyear grades show that cutting has been a far too wide-spread vice. Not only have most of the previous reasons for leniency disappeared, but there is the added obligation of a student of military age who should use his deferment or his reserve corps status to his fullest capacity while in the University. So far the war has had little effect on college life. This new regulation will hit the undergraduate in a very sore point and it will certainly force a more rigorous academic life. But it is a necessary change to meet the problems of a war time liberal arts college and it is neither small nor unimportant.