S.R.O.?

The real need of the University for an adequate Student Activities Center has been underscored heavily in the past two weeks-first by the difficulties of the two undergraduate dramatic groups with their theaters, and secondly by a Student Council investigation into the space requirements of the myriad and still homeless smaller extra-curricular activities.

Most spectacular of the proofs, from the student body's point of view, was the joint demonstration by the Harvard Dramatic Club and the Veterans Theater, who teamed up willy-nilly to illustrate the undeniable fact that there is now no available stage from which a college-sized organization can operate with any degree of comfort. Hampered by University restrictions on what can and what cannot be done to the physical properties of Sanders Theater, the HDC had to work something of a seene-shifting miracle, operate without benefit of a curtain, and speak their lines in an acoustical monstrosity in order to stage their show at all. A week later, the Veterans Theater found themselves saddled with a 1500 seat auditorium rented from Rindge Tech and half a mile out of the student's path to the box office. Yet with the Brattle Hall theater being occupied by a professional company, these two spots were all that were available.

The plight of the smaller organizations-the Red Book, the Album, and dozens of other groups of similar size-is no better. The Student Council, probing the matter, is finding out what too many people have known for too long: there is no office space, no convenient meeting place, in short, no facilities at all to be had within the University. As a result, the smaller organizations presently scrape out bare existences, scurrying from Junior Common Room to Junior Common Room, and carrying on their office work in somebody-or-other's overcrowded rom.

Relief from this state of affairs lies directly with the Associated Harvard Clubs and the Alumni Association, now pondering the problem of whether Harvard's war memorial will be a Music and Arts Center, a Medical Center, or a Student Activities Center. A joint deliberative committee of the two groups was appointed at the time of the Yale game, and its recommendations, not due for some length of time yet, will set in motion the wheels that will sell the idea, gather the money, and eventually see the final choice in finished brick and mortar.

Operating, as it must, politically, the University has not and will probably never so much as breathe a word what it would like, by way of a memorial. They will accept anything short of a fifty, foot granite obelisk. But the student body, with a greater potential for self-expression now than ever before, can hardly feel the same way. Nomad organizations and stageless actors cry for an integrated Student Activities Center.