Pump-Primings

To many undergraduates in the year 1946, a copy of the Crimson was a new and peculiar object, a suspicious offspring of the wartime cocoon (label: Harvard Service News) from which the Crime burst in 16-page auspiciousness on April 9.

Harvardmen of less recent vintage would have found the product less strange for the Crimson of April and May '46 has maintained, with the exception of a change in type face here and there, a remarkable resemblance to its rambling, liberal-minded, earnest--but not humorless--pre-war progenitor.

As always, topicality has been the keynote; a glance backard at 22 issues of Volume CXVI conjures up a picture of the University in the post-war maelstrom just as certainly as the 1873 pages paint us portraits of young men with Paris Garters and Fine Clothes.

At the dawn of the new era Crimson editorial policy paused for an impatient week of orientation before striking out at specific issues. In three editorials dealing with College, national, and international issues, the Crimson asked Quo Vadimus?, questioned the University on the progress of its General Education plan, the adequacy of its adjustments to veteran influx, and its proclaimed intention to admit more "healthy, normal extrovert" students; it queried the United States on its frantic return to normaley, the United Nations on its Big Four domination and atom bomb fumbling.

In the College, Tutorial was the battleground of the hour. A barrage of guarded accusations by the Undergraduate Committee on General Education hit the Administration for forcing curtailment of tutorial by financial pressure on departments--a conclusion which the group came to after extensive polling of faculty members. Crimson editorials examined the issue, warned against over-zealous "pruning by enthusiastic tutorial gardeners."

President Conant retorted that the Administration put no financial stringencies in the way, threw the issue back to the departments. The fight suspended with tutorial's first triumph, in the newly-formed Social Relations Department, which reconsidered an earlier decision and adopted "modified" tutorial. "Undergraduate opinion has won its first post-war victory," gloated the Crime.

With official enrollment estimates by the Provost ranging from 3000 for the summer term (later cut down to 2000) and 5800 for the fall in the College alone, attention of students, faculty, and administration swung to the nationally-spotlighted housing problem, soon to become a local crisis of sorts. Crimson editorials were eager for faster action by the University, and the Student Council formed an abortive housing Committee.

On this issue, however, officials of the administration stole the ball and ran it down the field. After setting up a central office in Straus Hall they ordered, received, and rapidly set up 198 FPHA family units which are already partially occupied. They have also leased the Brunswick Hotel in Boston for housing in the fall, applied for a Fort Devens area for married veterans' homes, requested 900 additional units from the FPHA, ordered 50 per cent increase in capacity of the Houses, and laid plans for Graduate dining halls.

Students were very much alive to world problems. After two Crime editorials urging food-saving, the Council polled the undergraduate body on the advisability of cutting portions here to buy for the starving abroad. An overwhelmingly favorable response enabled the College dining halls to save about $750 a week by omitting extra cookies, desserts, bread, and cereals. And when asked to send a delegate for New England to an International Students' Conference at Prague, the College voiced a strong affirmative in another Council poll.

After six months' deliberation, the faculty General Education Committee announced on May 14 its experimental courses for 1946-47. Seven in number, they will be open to Freshmen and Sophomores and will give undergraduates a chance to influence designing of courses by expressing their opinions. Students have been called upon, too, by the Provest to register their feelings over the next few months on a matter of educational policy, a Faculty-initiated move to reconsider the distinction between A.B. and S.B. degrees, the climax of decades of College doubt over its value.