Monro Deplores Narrow Coverage, Omission of Community Interests

The following articles has been submitted by John U. Monro '34 as a critical estimate of the Crimson. Anniversary eulogy, perusal will show, is not its aim.

It is a good time to look hard at the services of the CRIMSON to the Harvard community and to its own editors. As our newsmen-turned-author and our learned committees tirelessly remind us, our society needs now, more than even before, the services of a free and alert press. We look to the CRIMSON and we see at once the virtually assured circulation, the regular, if not munificent, income; we know that by time-honored custom the paper is free from censorship; we see a daily published by able young men in a community given over to the fermentation of ideas. Where else in the world is there to be found a paper more favored by circumstance? As believing democrats, optimistic for human freedom, we turn hopefully to the results.

There can be no doubt that the CRIMSON trains its own editors in the high arts of earning a modern living, trains them superbly well, better than any more college courses could hope or pretend. This is the age of the deadline; if a man would earn more than $65 a month he must forever do too much in too little time. It is the basic skill of our world, and it is one you learn getting 200 inches of copy downstairs to Art before one o'clock. As a useful byproduct you learn to turn night into day. In the daily working of the CRIMSON office comment books a man acquires the habit of candor, of free-swinging criticism, of speaking his mind: a good thing. Nowhere else in the college is the flamboyance of high school prose so thoroughly smashed; the rudeness of your peers does it, that and seeing your staff in print. A man learns to write, if not well, at any rate quickly and simply, and generally with the semblance of authority. This is what enables editors to bass examinations and stay in college, and the value of the lesson does not always diminish in later years.

Few Community Services

As a community services, I regret to record here my candid opinion that only on rare occasions does the CRIMSON fulfill the obligations which arise from its unique freedoms. Two or three instances from the past 15 years come immediately to mind, and will serve as good enough measuring stick. Certainly any list must be headed by Blair Clark's campaign to do away with tutoring schools in Harvard Square. We have had also the systematization of the "Confidential Guide to Courses" and the annual critique of fields of concentration; these are taken, still, with salt, but they do their job. From here we may shift to another plane altogether. If may recollection is correct, the names of Harvard's German war dead in World War I are listed in Memorial Church largely because the editors of the CRIMSON in 1931 felt and insisted that Harvard, as a great human institution devoted to truth, should regard war as a monstrous tragedy visited upon all the participants, regardless of boundary lines. This argument is a good deal touchier nowadays than it was in 1931, but the generous force of it remains to assure us that the world need not forever to mad.

Digest of College

Other campaigns and services there have certainly been, but not many more in the past 15 years that will measure up to these standards of performance. What we have seen published, day after day, is a digest of news pretty well restricted to the College Yard and its myriad dime-sized activity groups. Generally the stories are accurate enough, well-enough written, and painstakingly made up in typographical balance. Perhaps this is a sufficient miracle in itself, and we should be grateful for it. Yet one cannot help remarking the curious limbos of the CRIMSON'S world. It is, by and large, a world without graduate schools, without scientific discoveries, without state and national governments, without U.T.M. or a nation's worries about civil liberties. The majority of students are in the graduate departments, but the CRIMSON just does not get around to cover them. As one result the Law School student body, famously busy as it is, now published its own weekly Record. You could not guess from the CRIMSON that Harvard's hometown of Cambridge has been batting successfully, for some years, toward a sound municipal government. Some 75 percent of Harvard students are veterans receiving government benefits, but if you want to read about the ins and outs of the local V.A., the progress of veterans legislation at the State House and in Washington, you will not find it in the CRIMSON. When the Massachusetts legislature has bills under consideration affecting the universities, the CRIMSON will use a handout now and then, but there is no real drive to get the story and spread it. In this university world of ideas, debates are held, discussions attracting a thousand or more auditors, with scores unable to get it; the CRIMSON may permit itself two or three paragraphs of space for coverage on page three.

Simply, it seems to me, the CRIMSON editors have not, ever, taken the time out to discover and analyze the spread of Harvard's interests, and to organize a large enough staff and plan their coverage to serve this commonly wall. They have not ever looked hard at their own independence and freedom and seen in this little four-page daily the clear opportunity for effective personal journalism of the art that once shaped per democratic institutions and that we need badly now, and are losing. Obviously they do not know how far the voice of the CRIMSON can be heard, how great its power can be. Either that, or they simply do not care. The reader follows the doings of the freshman smoker committee and the local burlesque queens, and he may sometimes wonder.

It will be argued that the student effort to publish the CRIMSON as it stands is already prodigious, and I should be the first to agree. The answer is that the effort goes into the wrong places, into make-up and routine coverage mostly, operations which simply do not matter. Actually, the long habits of make-up, of a daily multitude of short stories carefully balanced according to the form book, have prevented editors from preparing and writing longer, thoughtful pieces about matters that seem important to the bulk of its readers.

A small paradox appears to us. The veteran newsman yearns for the freedom to tell his hard-won truth and save the world. Your college editor, with all the old-fashioned freedoms at his disposal, lots them go; he is just too inexperienced to know and use them. I wish to dust off some old chestnuts for the present editors of the CRIMSON. The world is moving fast and will not wait. Freedom of the press carries with it the heavy responsibility for alert, thorough coverage of the news and thoughtful opinion, a responsibility that will permit no boundaries to effort. Gentlemen, it is your world no less than ours. You owe it to yourselves to make the big try