Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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Geologisls in the woods. of women emerged at midnight from the Graduate Center or from Lowell House? Two days after this outburst a committee of House chairmen re- quested the Housemasters to extend parietal hours 011 the Dartmouth and Yale weekends. Two days after this a petition for midnight permissions every weekend Was set afoot in the Houses. The sponsors of this petition, Leonard J. Friedman :51 and John M. Goldstone ,51, relied mainly on the more subtle argument that men denied the use of their own rooms for social purposes were forced to have recourse to the low, expensive, and inevitably de- bilitating dives of the metropolitan area. Their petition, backed by this reasoning and the signa- tures of over 2000 House members iover two thirdsi, was presented to the Housemasters, met one day in august session. As was expected, noth- ing further happened, and the issue died quickly. Changes are not often made in parietal rules; and the more concerted the campaign put on by the undergraduates the more lecherous they look. Restraint and more than the utmost in decorum is required, and of course no one is inclined to listen to decorous whispers. The parking problem was iisolvedi9 once again, eveh before men had returned from summer vaca- tions. This year the motif was to be close cooper-

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Spring termis end-the last days of college and civilian life. Spring term,s beginningaquickest registration Mem Hall ever saw. The new' Graduate Center, besides stirring the aesthetic sensibilities of many, set off a contro- versy about parietal rules. The rules for the Graduate Center held that men could entertain women in their rooms until midnight i1 a.m. on weekendsi but that there had to be at least two women in each party. Most graduate students found this rule ridiculous and in no time at all one enterprising man founded a ciCoupIe-Sitting Service,7 which offered Radcliffe girls as third par- ties, at the regular baby-sitting rates, provided only that there was enough light in the room to study by. The project had its charms--the promoter sug- gested, for example, that a man could hire two couple-sitters and take his choiceebut it was soon scotched, as the rule was rescinded. Word of the Grad Center parietal rules soon reached the College and inspired a different and stronger reaction. After a brief snort at the idiocy of requiring an extra girl, undergraduates soon jumped to the more important issue: graduates were being allowed five more hours of grace. The Crimson, ever alert for traces of paternalism in Administration rulings, Hung itself into battle. Were graduate students five hours more mature than undergraduates, it asked? And did it matter, in the eyes of public opinion, whether a stream

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ation between the University and Cambridge police. The University announced a giant registration drive and set up parking lots across the river near the Business School. More men than ever before registered talmost 2500 for the whole Universityl and many used the distant cross-river lots. But no matter how registered he is and no matter how bestickered his car, no normal man is going to drive across the river and walk back when he can nudge his way into a slot on Fender Alley. And no normal man cares much about the occasional fines tmaximum 353 which he pays, sometimes, on his tickets. 50 life Went on much as beforeee a lazy, good-natured battle between the tagging cop and the parking student. The cops took the philo- sophical attitude, recognized a perennial human frailty, and played the game. Beside the benevo- lent uncle the University seemed like a puritan- nical grandmother. No doubt there will be an- other tisolution,7 next year, and no doubt cops and parkers will continue to settle the matter in their own way. Now that the football ticket distribution system has been stabilized for several years, the entre- preneurs have had a chance to develop their sys- tems too. A casual stroller down Quincy Street early on any fall morning could see the usual row of beady-eyed, l'Julging-pocketed, little men waiting for the doors to open, and any innocent student Who arrived at the HAA olhces about 9:15 21.111. and found himself, say, 50th in line would find that the 49 men in line ahead of him were getting at least a thousand tickets. Huge syndicates were formed and it was often necessary to spend the night outside the Union in order to get anywhere near the best seats available. The Council urged an investigation but there was really nothing wrong with the system except that men fourth and fifth in line, so near and yet so far, occasionally suf- fered from palpitations. The beady-eyed men were simply carrying a good principle to its logical extreme. If the ticket system was becoming firmly estab- lished, so was the attitude the Harvard man car-