To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Apropos of your editorial in Thursday morning's issue on "Hostility to Harvard", I note that Arthur Train with whose stories, of "Tutt and Mr. Tutt" a greater part, no doubt, of the undergraduate population is familiar--refers in this week's number of the Saturday Evening Post in not at all complimentary terms to what he is pleased to regard as "Harvard snobbishness." If there is any single cause of the growing hostility to Harvard, it is in this widespread and perhaps not altogether mistaken belief that a Harvard graduate is another name for a conceited young snob.

I remember I was told before entering college--by a graduate of Brown, I think it was--that no man could go to Harvard and stay there four years without becoming a snob. This man, like Arthur Train, cited the choice maxim, "You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him anything," as proof of his allegation. As a neophyte I was considerably impressed by this statement, but managed somehow to reserve my judgment and entered the Freshman class in 1916. In all this time I had heard nothing of the high intellectual standards which prevail at Harvard; the most I knew of the University was its supremacy in athletics (there had been a football victory about that time, I believe).

After having been graduated from Harvard, I am inclined to doubt the existence of a "Harvard type" as such. Among graduates of Harvard there may be snobs--those who would deny it most strenuously are very likely to be those most open to fault--but certainly they are not numerous, no more so than graduates of other colleges, at least. Whether the "type" to which Arthur Train refers was more prevalent in the earlier days of Harvard, when the student body was more localized in its geographical distribution than at present, is a question which I do not feel competent to judge. In any case I suggest that those who are acquainted with Harvard men whom they consider to be snobs attribute the fact of snobbishness to the men themselves rather then to the college from which they were graduated. If there exists a wide-spread belief outside New England to the effect that Harvard College is a manufactory of snobs, the quickest way to remove hostility to Harvard arising from such a cause is to disabuse the popular mind of such a notion, and the surest way to do this is not by propaganda but by example. CARL S. JOHNSON '20.

March 4, 1921.