Now Is the Hour

When the seven Housemasters gather today, they will probably have two measures dealing with parietal rules up for consideration. One would extend the deadline for entertaining women in House rooms to 12 midnight on the Dartmouth and Yale weekends, and the other would make 12 o'clock the limit on every Saturday night throughout the year.

The arguments in favor of the limited proposal speak even more cogently for the general one. It is not especially on the Yale and Dartmouth weekends that more entertainment facilities are needed. On these weekends there are House dances and all manner of festivities to keep couples amused. The ordinary weekends, when there are no big sports spectacles or dances, are the times when the students most need a place to entertain girls.

As things stand now, House residents who have neither cars nor lavish expense accounts really have nowhere to take their dates after movies or theaters let out on Saturday evenings. The only places open are bars and restaurants around the Square. House common rooms, even if they were opened for the women in the evenings, would be little more sociable than hotel lobbies.

Principal objections to any relaxation of parietal rules have centered on the immorality of women staying in students' rooms until midnight. But anything that can be done in the rooms between 8 and 12 can be done before 8, and it is certainly no more moral for students and their dates to be sitting in local bars all evening. In its zeal to keep the Houses pure, the Administration has only moved the basic problem a little way up Dunster Street, and has achieved no solution at all.

If the Housemasters act favorably on extending the permission time to midnight on all weekends, they will have made a sensible start toward solving one of the College's most serious social dilemmas.