A Matter of Attitude

The difference between going to a man's apartment and seeing him alone in yours is much the same as that which certain small boys find between the flavor of cherries eaten in the highest branches of the tallest tree and those same cherries on the dinner table.

--Emily Post

Harvard in 1952 set a national precedent by allowing girls to visit boys' rooms for what now amounts to 35 hours weekly. Last month Emily Post would have said, "I told you so." Dean John U. Monro, "badly shaken up recently by some severe violations," declared that "what was once considered a pleasant privilege has now come to be considered a license to use the college rooms for wild parties or for sexual intercourse."

What was going on? Mary I. Bunting, president of Radcliffe (where boys can visit girls in their rooms up to 25 hours a week), saw "no indication that there has been any serious trouble." Harvard's boys and girls generally pooh-poohed Monro's alarm. But the usually tolerant dean, who feels that probably 90% of the students have high moral standards, is less concerned about incidents than about interpretation. As one senior revealingly wrote in the Crimson: "Morality is a relative concept projecting certain mythologies associated with magico-religious beliefs."

Harvard Psychiatrist Graham B. Blaine Jr. (Harvard '40) last week added fuel to the debate. Supporting Monro in a Crimson interview, Blaine quoted one of those unprovable surveys on rates of maidenhood. His showed that between 1938 and 1953 the rate of nonvirginity among college girls rose from 35% to 50%. "Colleges put themselves in a unique position by allowing girls in boys' bedrooms," said Blaine, who thinks Harvard should and could draw the line at living rooms. But that was not quite Monro's point. "Every year we have a skirmish over social hours," he said. "This year there was a difference. We're worried by what we discovered in the way of attitudes."

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