To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Nearly a month has elapsed since your paper took double column umbrage at certain strictures which Perry Marks and myself coincided in making upon the Ph.D. Since I unfortunately did not see the editorial in question at that time, I should like now, however belatedly, to make an apologia (not an apology) for my article in Liberty.

As your readers are doubtless aware, there is often considerable difference between an article submitted and an article printed . . . such a difference, indeed, that the original is scarcely recognizable when compared with the decollate finished product.

In the case of my essay, the transformation was both startling and thorough. Although I devoted, as requested, special pains and over 3,000 words to the gowning of my theme, when it actually appeared it was only half clothed--and radically differently, at that. Most of the scholarly detail was mutilated or entirely missing. In several places, decent color was suggestively heightened. The egotistical tiara which concluded the new version was made from foolscap, paste, and ink not of my manufacture and was substituted for the constructive suggestions which alone gave excuse and meaning to my design. Lastly, the editors of Liberty, possessed by an extreme Annanias complex, left me to shoulder the blame for their casuistry by appending the following editors' note:--"The article is printed as submitted, except that certain elisions have been made for the sake of brevity."

Although I now realize that a judicious absence of clothes makes the heart of the Five-Cent Public grow warmer and that the catering to such people in such a way is probably not uncommon in the lower journalistic circles, I must state that I was disagreeably surprised and shocked to discover that the CRIMSON would commit a similar breach of newspaper ethics. The writer of your editorial, I am forced to assume, willfully concealed all knowledge of my article as submitted and concealed it in order to score in a manner which, even in terms of the printed article, was somewhat sophistical. A copy of my original manuscript had been in your possession since September and was read and discussed by the members of your board--including the student who wrote the editorial. Because of this and because you had full permission to reprint the manuscript in full subsequent to its publication in Liberty, it would seem that you, and not I, are responsible for the purveying of "that insidious half truth which can make more trouble than all the error possible for any popular periodical to gather in a year." (I quote directly one of your editorial assertions.)

I note that at the end of your editorial it is alleged that "neither the author of 'The Plastic Age' nor a writer for 'Liberty' can produce the panacea" and that "the duty of those who have education on their minds as well as their hearts is to find a method by which the doctorate may be in the truest sense humanized". Such a conjunction of claims would imply that neither Mr. Marks nor myself has the slightest interest in the humanization of the doctorate requirements, and what is more, that the idea of such humanization has never occurred to either of us.

In my own case at least, nothing could be further from the truth. Humanization and very definite suggestions for its introduction were the two things which I specifically stressed. "My article was, in its small way, simply and solely a plea for just such an academic Renaissance. Because Liberty omitted all my suggestions for reform, the whole character and tone of my article was distorted. Originally, it was not a condemnation of all college teachers who have labored and gained the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, but an attack on the existing standards which I believed, and still believe, to be detrimental to the best interests of college teaching.

I am sending a copy of this letter to the Dean of Harvard College and to the Administrative Board. I trust that at your earliest opportunity you will be good enough to publish this letter from a former editor of your paper and publish it without "certain elisions the sake of brevity." It I could have guessed that my ideas were to suffer a change into something so rich and strange. I should never have written for Liberty at all. Believe me very sorry for a misunderstanding which I was totally incapable of preventing. FREDERICK DEWOLFE PENGREE '24