Does the Harvard Lampoon hit too hard, or are academic communities abnormally thin-skinned? At royal courts the function of the king's fool was to rush in where statesmen feared to tread. It was recognized as one needful to the safety of monarchy itself. The true word spoken in jest might be the salvation of the throne. Shall opinion in a modern university be more autocratic than monarchy, and revoke the jester's license?

Objections to the Lampoon's satire are mainly that it is in poor taste, Quite possibly. But what is at issue here is something more vital than any question of taste; more vital than the respect unquestionably due Mr. Harkness for his munificent gift; more vital even than the "House Plan" of instruction. What is at issue here is the right of undergraduates to think for themselves, and to criticize the educational experiments of which they themselves are to be the subject matter. Their strictures may be ridiculously conservative. Undergraduate opinion usually is. But independent thinking must begin somewhere, and the way to begin is to start. The University itself is perhaps unwilling that a gift of $13,000,000 should be construed as constituting ipso facto immunity from critical comment by its undergraduates.....

"Individualistic Harvard"; the phrase is a happy one. Are we to praise undergraduates for individuality in one breath and blame them for it in the next? If there is a college where individuality is still fostered in this machine-sewn, mass-quantity-production, stamping-mill, best-possible-of-all-universes, the United States, then why complain when its undergraduates do express themselves, even if maladroitly? Are these youngsters comically and unwittingly on the wrong side of the fence; is the "House Plan" they criticize designed expressly to promote the very individualism which makes possible their objection? Very probably. But there is a sportmanship of the intellect, and it forbids us, in dealing with adversaries, to demand that the game be canceled before having been played and ourselves adjudged the winners.

If there is one complaint above all others from which the whole of American life most acutely suffers, it is timidity--should one say, the entire absence?--of minority opinion. Yet so needful is minority opinion to the health of democratic institutions that it should be encouraged at all costs. Where everybody thinks alike, there, be sure, is mental stagnation and spiritual death.

Harvard University stands on a cultural soil three centuries deep. People elsewhere are scandalized at the repeated explosions which detonate the political and intellectual life of New England. Does it occur to them that such explosions may be vastly to the credit of a community? Does it occur to them that the deeper scandal may be absence of such explosions? --The Boston Globe.