Noah Got Drunk

Academic festivities of this week mark the conclusion of Harvard's first postwar year. Roughly paralleling the manner of their departure, the faint trickle of returning veterans last September, enlarged to a heavy stream by February, and promises to become an overwhelming flood by next fall. With them they brought back an outlook, not changed but deepened by the experience of war.

Undergraduates' thinking developed markedly from that June day in 1940 when a Crimson editorial voiced their fear "that under the guise of preparedness (we) will be catapulted into a futile and devastating foreign war while our own democracy crashes in ruins," to the bewildering 8th of December, 1941 when they decided, "we can see that it is our job to fight, and we are not only willing but eager to accept our task." Realistic, constructive thinking reached its summit when in early 1943 a poll of student opinion indicated that ninety-six percent favored "some sort of world council or international union after the war" and a great majority committed themselves to a permanent international police force. At that time the Crimson optimistically began a series of "articles on post-war problems and planning by outstanding authorities on the tasks that will beset the peace commission." Departing men from all the classes cheered the Class Orator at the special valedictory service held in January of 1943 when he set forth the principle "that isolation for America belongs as much to the past as the town pump . . . And the more we submerge ourselves to the interest of . . . greater international organization the better it will be for global cooperation and ultimately for ourselves."

It has been difficult here as elsewhere to stay at the high tide of optimism. The veteran, backed by G.I. Benefits, has not found his personal problems of readjustment difficult. But veteran and non-veteran alike find hard the complex of college, national, and international problems which now vie for their attention. The temptation is great to become immersed in the close-at-hand affairs of the University, or to concentrate overly much on tasks of limited scope such as shipping food boxes to foreign students. Even greater is the temptation to follow the example of Noah who returned to the safety of dry lands after the deluge only to partake excessively of the fruit of the vine. But always there is the realization that the problems of primary importance, the problems which brought on the catastrophe of our time, are not yet being successfully faced.

Cynicism is not the philosophy of real leaders. Nor does escapism befit those who prepare for leadership. That is why students now seeking to prepare for a part in world affairs, greater in number than ever before, still look hopefully to the future. That is why they scornfully deny the charge of the Phi Beta Kappa speaker at Sanders Theatre yesterday that "in war our young manhood and womanhood was not afraid of dying, but strangely now it shrinks from living," yet echo enthusiastically his message: "There is yet time for valour."