SEVERAL communications have reached us relating to the decisions of the Faculty in regard to the Glee Club concerts and theatrical performances given by students. These, together with our own observation, show that there is a very general and even bitter feeling among the students against these decisions, as arbitrary, and hostile to their natural rights.

Although regarding ourselves as a medium for the expression of College opinion, we also regard it as part of our duty to prevent any hasty and extreme utterance of such opinion before the facts of the case are fully known, feeling, as we do, that such opinions have too often lost their proper weight by ill-advised expression. Before inquiring into this particular case, we must indicate, with all due respect to the Faculty, one cause which, we conceive, has produced by far the larger number of misunderstandings between Faculty and students. The decisions of our instructors in matters which concern us most nearly are never distinctly, and in terms, made known to the mass of the students, but are spread by rumor in such a mutilated form as to create the grossest misconceptions. To prove this, one need only turn to the College journals, and notice the columns of matter explanatory of the College law. Such decisions as the present should appear on the bulletin-board in the precise terms in which they were passed, as naturally as the notice of any examination. Whether reasons should be annexed is a matter for the Faculty to decide, but we honestly believe that by giving reasons, they would, without compromise of dignity, protect themselves against frequent misrepresentation.

That harmony between instructors and instructed which we had hoped was to be the watchword of the future, can never be realized until both do all in their power to remove the causes of misunderstanding. In regard to the present matter, the feeling of the students seems in brief to be this: These decisions, if adhered to, will in the end destroy the existence of two hitherto considered very respectable and characteristic Harvard institutions, and much cripple the energies of a third, besides preventing the friends of the students from meeting them in a way agreeable and advantageous to both parties. That this will be the result we firmly believe. The experience of our Reading-Room proves conclusively that nothing but our boating interest can be well supported by subscription, and even this with the utmost difficulty. There must then be a very strong reason for such a blow at the very life of these institutions of the students. If there is any pernicious influence at work in entertainments given for money, detrimental to the best interests of the University, then by all means let them go.

The reason for these decisions is, as we understand it, this: That students, by demanding money for their performances, put themselves in the light of professionals before the public, and thereby lower their own dignity and that of the College. Parents may thus be deterred from sending their sons to Harvard, and the high tone of the University lost. It is not likely that any large number regard our entertainments as hurtful in themselves.

The question is, then, whether such is, in reality, the tendency of our present system of entertainments. The students say it is not. A theory of what might be has been substituted for the observation of what really is. This is the opinion of the more moderate, who would not go so far as to deny the right of the Faculty to restrict the students' independence in such matters. For ourselves, we cannot see how the same reasons which would lead the Faculty to oppose an extended tour of the Glee Club should also lead them to prohibit all performances for money in Cambridge and Boston, where nine tenths of the audience are always the friends and relatives of the performers, and the fee is asked merely to defray expenses, and contribute to the support of boating. Cases by no means parallel have been regarded in the same light.

We hope that these decisions will at least be modified, so as to allow Glee Club concerts and dramatic representations to be given, as heretofore, in Boston and Cambridge.