Ninety Cents, Please

Interhouse eating privileges have been a matter of long-standing debate, but a new angle of the problem has been created by the split up of the original classes of 1943, '44, and '45 into college and graduate students. At present men in the Houses can eat supper in other Houses, but no corresponding privileges are allowed between the Houses, the Business School, and the Union dining hall.

All men in the University eating at Harvard dining halls are required to sign 21-meal contracts at $10.50 a week, and the food is hardly different enough to create a stampede for select cooking if everyone with weekly contracts were allowed to eat at any of the dining halls. At present, each House or hall has a list of its members, who are checked off as they pass through the chow line. The simplest method would be to allow interhouse slips to be signed for any guest with an eating contract any place in the University, but if Lehman Hall found this created too much confusion, the dining hall cards to be distributed next fall could be printed like ration cards with space to punch a limited number of meals in the dining halls of the other schools.

It is an understandable temptation for the University to maintain that such a project would entail too much red tape, but there would be no extra food expense, and to the men of those classes broken up after three or four years leave of absence, such a project would be well worth the small amount of extra printing or bookkeeping involved. Ninety cents out of the chit book seems an unnecessary alternative to an even more costly meal at the Square.