Worth Waiting For

The fundamental question before the War Memorial Committee at tomorrow's meeting is whether the University's fallen of World War II shall win commemoration through a "symbolic" gesture such as chimes for Appleton Chapel or through a "utilitarian" improvement such as a Student Activities Center. No intelligent culling of top alternatives can come out of the eleven separate proposals until this decision has been reached.

For great stress will center on the simple impossibility of a large-scale drive for funds in competition with the Lamont Library. Any utilitarian project of SAC's scope surely requires financial backing over the million-dollar mark. First things first: let us decide what we want and then let us worry about getting it. After the first World War ten years elapsed before the erection of Memorial Chapel. Who will not gladly wait two years or more now to see something transcending a monument or a set of bells?

This holds true regardless of whether or not the Student Activities Center, backed by the undergraduate body last spring, gains the Committee's eventual support. The many recommended scholarship funds--Class-by-Class, international exchange, or a national one for deserving students in the U.S.--must each involve heavy endowments to make a contribution to education paralleling by one iota the contribution of life. This holds true also for extension of medical facilities, or for monetary grants in behalf of psychological research.

But this especially is the issue affecting the selection of a Student Activities Center. In addition to its conference rooms and work shops, SAC would have to provide a large auditorium for the use of performers and lecturers. SAC cannot be sealed up or down in dimensions like other of the utilitarian suggestions. The need it must fill and the discomfitures it must erase are themselves too big.

These discomfitures occur when organizational headquarters from mimeograph to addressograph end up in the president's room--or when a theater group orders its sets delivered to Rindge Tech Auditorium. Henry Lee Higginson described what had been missing until November of 1899 at a mass meeting then celebrating the Union's inaugural: "A Harvard student needs and has the right to every advantage which the government of the University can give. Neither books, nor lectures, nor games can replace the benefits arising from free intercourse with all his companions." It is worth sweating out Lamont's construction for the promise of a. War Memorial conceived today in that spirit.