Some time ago the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers appointed a joint committee to select a plan for a permanent memorial to the graduates and undergraduates dead in the war. Apparently the committee can't make up its mind, or doesn't deem it judicious, to do so until it knows more about graduate opinion on the subject. Some of the suggested products are curious. A university chapel, to supplant the present Appleton Chapel, for instance. Appleton Chapel is a monument of the '50s. With no disrespect to its worthy founder, it is one of the bleakest and ugliest buildings ever raised by the hand of man. Possibly, however, undergraduate esthetic feeling toward it has been softened since the compulsory huddling of students at too early hours was abolished. It can't be destroyed, it seems. Possibly, if it stands 100 or 200 years longer, it may acquire architectural merit; may come to be recognized as "uaint" or "venerable." The taste of generations differs; and our descendants may learn to adore what we should have liked to burn.

Since Appleton Chapel is to be immortal, it seems superfiuous to build a rival; and a memorial to men of different sects and religions shouldn't be religious. The project of a hall large enough for commencement pomps and occasional great meetings has found scant faver. If the college keeps on growing, no hall built in these times will suffice; and the steady cost of maintenance for only sporadic uses make the plan economically unsound. Some thinkers have devised a scheme of a building part hall and part gymnasium. A singular marriage. Some graduates hold that the memorial shouldn't be of any base "utilitarian" character, but purely a work of art, monument, sculptural or both.

The suggested memorial quadrangle, a group of dormitories, ought to satisfy both the utilitarians and the severe esthetes. Harvard needs new dormitories, and Princeton and Yale have shown with what charm and dignity they can be designed.... Another assemblage of dormitories might be as gracious and splendid a memorial as the university could raise to its sons nobly dead. New York Times.