In twenty years Harvard has shifted from being the only American college to treat the practical theatre as a branch of education, to being almost the only good college not to. . . . . .

In short, through their practical courses in the arts of the theatre, many of our colleges are taking their place today, have indeed taken it, in the creative artistic life of America. This, I think, is a boon to America, and a deuced advance in college education. For that reason I am, as a graduate of Harvard, all the more grieved that my own university, where Professor Baker started the whole movement, has been the one ranking institution to repudiate it, and is now permitting Yale, North Carolina, Iowa, California, and so on, to influence the practical theatre arts of today, while Harvard goes happily back to a philological study of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, or awards a Ph. D. for a thesis about the influence of Latin Comedy on the plays of Ben Jonson. I vastly prefer Iowa, where you can get at least an A. M. for a first rate job of stage production. I think it is a good deal more important today to develop a Ben Jonson of our own than to pore endlessly over the works of one dead three hundred years. Certainly Broadway this past winter has borne heartening testimony to the fact that many American Universities think so, even if Harvard doesn't.

--Walter-Prichard Eaton in Vanity Fair.