Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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Humanities Like mo , ent rom Cam- bridge during World War I. But after my return in 1919, I heard tales of college life during the previous two years that strained my creduliry: tales of aging professors marching up and down Cambridge Common in ill-fitting khaki, of a poet challenged by a sentry and chased around the Lazmpoon building by rookies armed with bayonets, of a noted scholar who, engaged to lecture on Byron, somehow managed to twist his subject into a tirade against Bulgaria. Today, graver though this war be, people are more balanced. There has been an extraordinary adjustment to a challenge which, threatening civilization, therefore threatens the Humanities. From my own observation and that of others perhaps less biased in favour of the Humanities, there is agreement that the young men of toda unde d st of my generation I was abs f y rstan that the deviation into misapplied science is temporary, and that meanwhile such studies as Literature, the Fine Arts, Music, the Classics, and Philosophy, are more important than ever. Samuel Hazzard Cross P f The fi c courses can not be encouraging at a time when most students must devote their time to preparation for the Service. But I am not talking vague optimism when I state that the 'general eagerness to acquire some knowledge of the Humanities is greater than it has been in years, and that the future will show a return to formal enrollment in those courses the value of which has become the more recognizable the more they have heen withheld by circumstances. War's annals will cloud into night ere their story die. This fact is known by the genera- tion of World War II much more clearly than before. From the small numbers of men who are able to continue their humanistic studies we learn of the impatience of others who would resume them. The general spirit seems to be that there is a necessary task to be accomplished with the greatest cool- ness and the least hysteria. From such a spirit the Humanities were born, and from that they will renew their timeless powers. Robert Hillyer '17 gures of enrollment in su h , ro essor of Slavic Lan u g ages and Literatures.