A Man's A Man

To one who measures progress by the movements of his feet, his shoulders, and the second hand of his timepiece, Harvard Hall is the most irritating bottle-neck of this exuberant academic era. But to him who stands aside to watch men and women queuing up for knowledge instead of nylons, the scene is full of delectation. Perhaps the show is gross deception; it may be a purely quantitative disequilibrium of supply and demand for wooden seats. Yet the illusion persists that there is a qualitative element slipped in, that a dwindling coefficient of wooden heads is a determinant in the equation.

If the bystander enters the hall and tarries a bit, the illusion is fortified by the cluster around the lecturer's desk at the end of the hour's immersion. More and more undergraduates give sign of regarding fewer and fewer professors as either mummies or policemen.

The tide no longer shrinks from the man who "looks through the eyes of the dead, or feeds on the specters in books," in the cavalier estimation of Walt Whitman. Recognition is coming to him as potential philosopher and friend. He may not quite meet the test of "a very delectable, highly respectable, thrippenny bus young man," the role so coveted by Bunthorne. But at least, the clusterers seem to say, he is human. Of course, that may not be what they will be saying after the blue books are in.