Dean Monro's Scandal

The naive assumption that "honest public discussion" solves all controversies seems especially dubious in the current debate on parietals. Honest public discussion so far has done nothing but subject the University to a great deal of distasteful prose and provide the Boston press with several days of delicious copy.

Dean Monro's enthusiasm for such discussion is more disturbing than the CRIMSON's editorial endorsement of it. Dean Monro has long felt that prevalent attitudes of Harvard students and some administrators toward moral matters leave much to be desired, and his statements this fall are not his first attempts to change these attitudes. Until now, however, he has not found much of an audience either among the student body or among the Faculty. This fall, the Dean's tactic has been to convince as many people as possible that some sort of scandal was imminent if the attitudes persisted. His campaign was a perfect example of the self-fulfilling prophecy: the "Harvard Sex Scandal" now in the news resulted directly and solely from the Dean's own ill-advised allusions to shadowy "incidents" and "wild parties."

Perhaps it is going too far to suggest that Dean Monro has been Machiavellian enough to foment the present furor deliberately in order to win Faculty members to his side. Yet the Dean's apparent satisfaction at having the controversy reach Sunday supplements across the country is most disquieting. Harvard has always tried to prevent the emotions of the outside world from shaping University policy. It does not, as a rule, care to have its decisions made by national debate. Now, the Dean, having conducted a discussion in a way that assured tremendous publicity, welcomes further discussion with the hope that it will bring about a readjustment of undergraduate (and, presumably, Faculty) opinion.

If, as he has said, Dean Monro intended simply to examine undergraduate attitudes on such matters as parietal rules and pre-marital intercourse, he need not have attempted to create a highly emotional atmosphere by hinting at scandal. In choosing to have the discussion go beyond Harvard, he has implied that the Masters and senior tutors are not competent to make decisions on parietal rules and has clouded the whole issue with further emotionalism.

(The above represents a minority opinion of the CRIMSON Editorial Board.)