Sever Seats Alarm

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

I am writing about the Sever chairs. This letter is the delayed expression of first growing doubt, then smouldering disgust and alarm, not only at the new chairs themselves but at the sheepish, unthinking acquiescence with which we accept them. A prophetic eye would discern in the chairs a sign of a new attitude toward education, and perhaps also in their slow but sure advance, Hitler-fashion, from classroom to classroom, a symbol of the gradual and easy deception and deadening of popular reaction.

To attack on the first level of objection, there is the question of which would you rather sit at or in? A ten foot long piece of wood sculpture of ancient indigenous origin, with lots of room on which to lay your note-book, of whatever shape you may have, and your hat, if you wear one, your spare pencil, your spectacles and your watch, with lots of leg-room underneath, to tilt, squirm, or sprawl as the fancy seizes you-or a smooth, varnished wood-and-iron chair, carved to fit your bottom, screwed immovably to the floor, with the right arm designed for writing on, that is widened enough to take one roundish shaped piece of paper or a clip-board, no place to put your elbow, a sort of island in a useless unfriendly void?

There is something about screwing a chair to the floor which carries unpleasant associations, mainly a feeling of compulsion, of regimentation. The occupant of a screwed-down chair seems more often than not to be a victim, a passive but restless recipient of a necessary, but irksome attention. I must be thinking of barbers' chairs, dentists' chairs, and possibly electric chairs. Somehow screwing down seems inappropriate to a class-room.

The next level of attack is on the matter of economy. Some people, upon seeing a chair or a desk 70 years old, feel automatically urged, by a kind of reflex action, to buy a new one. Others like myself, equally automatically, would cherish it, looking forward to the day when it will be 100.

Estimated Cost

I suspect that for my luxury, some $10,000 are spent (a wild guess based on 30 rooms each with 30-odd chairs, at $10 a chair) at a time when even those of us who don't know much about what goes on in the outside world have some inkling that affairs are not at their normal smoothness, and education in particular is not rolling in gold. We are warned by college presidents that if the tax payer doesn't help, private educational institutions will go down. We receive heart-rending pleas for money from conscientious people who want to help war-torn people and home-less children whose homes we have helped to destroy, and in the same mail requests for gifts to the Harvard Fund to keep the University going. Then Harvard bows, pushes a $10,000 chair under our bottom and says, "Pray, make yourself comfortable."

All this suggests, and here I am at the third level, that education is all a matter of money like everything else, war, scientific advance, even religion to a large extent. Given a good place to sit in (and a luxury super library to read in) anybody with the financial stuff can become an educated citizen.

I misdoubt I have gone too far. My optimist has carried me away and led me to overshoot the mark. The last paragraph is not true. The man who politely but firmly declines to sit in an old-fashioned chair to learn: is he worth educating? Can he be educated? Who dare answer? Frederic Cunningham, Jr. 4G.