Educational Facility

A few passages of Professor MacLeish's "Preliminary Statement of Purpose" for the Harvard Theatre, though very generally worded, raise uneasy questions about the degree of faculty control to be exercised in the new and more stately mansion. Even if Professor MacLeish's proposals for a permanent director and standing committee of the faculty to run the theatre are adopted, the new theatre should be run according to the same general policy as the present ones.

The University has always had the power to determine which plays are presented in its theaters, but up to now it has wisely allowed proposals for student productions to come from student groups. No production originated by students has been set aside for the pet project of a faculty member. Equally important, no case has recently come to light of a refusal to give theater space to a play on aesthetic or "moral" grounds.

As a result, all sorts of plays have been presented on Harvard property, in theaters and House dining rooms. Among them have been a leggy operetta that set one observer talking about "a restoration of paganism"; a steaming drama of the torn-undershirt school; a lurid melodrama of rape, murder, and adultery; and a play about a young man who accuses his mother of making her bed "a couch for luxury and damned incest."

And the past few theater seasons in Cambridge have been as artistically exciting as any in the memory of most of its inhabitants. "The Harvard Theater," says the MacLeish statement, "is to be an educational facility," and recent seasons have been educational, too, even by the most Dryasdust standards: the last two of the four examples given above are on the reading lists of courses given by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Moreover, Harvard productions have been the center of admiring attention at the Yale Drama Festivals.

Under the terms of the "Preliminary Statement" (which was written for the Faculty Committee on the Theatre), the standing faculty committee-to-be will be able to reject plays unless "it is satisfied that the plays proposed meet the standards this university should maintain." "Proposals for the production of plays may originate with student groups, with members of the University faculties, with members of the Cambridge community or with the standing committee." If Professor MacLeish's statement is adopted, the faculty and its committee should use these powers of proposing and rejecting with discretion, i.e. seldom or never, keeping them in reserve should emergencies occur or spontaneous student interest decline.

Faculty control has a valuable function to serve in scheduling the college and community groups who will want to use the theatre. But under Professor MacLeish's program or under any other system, "aesthetic autonomy" is desirable as long as Harvard students show their present ability to make it work.