Harvard Restricts

Like many another university, big, heterogeneous Harvard has reached a point at which she feels obliged to pick, choose and restrict her matriculants in kind and number. Last fortnight candidates for entrance next autumn received notice that the classes of 1930 to 1934 inclusive would be limited to 1,000, including transfer students and "repeaters." This meant a cut of 150 or so below this year's freshman class, definitely a cut but hardly immoderate. The hue and cry that arose was over the news that the committee reserved discretionary powers in admitting candidates without examinations.

There were echoes of the outcry of 1922, when Harvard considered barring Jews. For what purpose could the admissions committee want the photographs if not to discover how many Lipskys and Finkelsteins were concealed under names like Jones and Smith? And private schools like Exeter, Andover, Groton, etc., asked to know what the discretionary power would do if not deprive them of automatic Harvard entrance-certificates for their seven high-stand men each year.

The Crimson (undergraduate daily) approved the new regulations in this curious backhand fashion: "The function of the University is to produce gentlemen--in the best sense of the term, but the University needs a leaven of students who are not gentlemen."

Religious or racial discrimination was stoutly denied, however, by Harvard officials. And the discretionary power was explained this way: It was desirable to be able to admit high-stand students on certificate, not only from the eastern private schools that point specially for the college board examinations, but from schools in the South and West as well, where the college board is unknown either as a criterion or a cramp.