"The tyranny of so-called efficiency" is "The Harvard Crimson's" phrase for the red tape of the university's employment bureau, which seems to have an attack of questionnaires. One would think that some simple entries about the student looking for a job would be enough for the bureau, seeing that the applicant's character, circumstances and attainments have been investigated to exhaustion before his admission to the university. But the bureau files must be fed with questionnaires more and more and more inquisitive, according to "The Crimson," under threats of blacklisting the applicants; the latter must now, as the latest requirement, file pictures of themselves and a budget of their year's income and proposed expenditures. Whoever has been wound in coils of bureaucratic tape will sympathize with the Harvard newspaper's suggestion that the employment office assume "some Harvard indifference. Indifference to what is not its business."

In these efficient days nobody but an anchorite can escape the statistical hounds. On every trail the researchers are in full cry. Who knows in how many bureaus you may be tabulated and cross-indexed, if only to point a social moral or illustrate an economic trend? Nobody so humble or so proud but some official Boswell has captured him for an exhibit. The inquisitors get you from ambush anyhow, but if you expose yourself directly to the questionnaire volley by applying for something you are riddled, as at Harvard. You are filed, indexed, blue printed, graphed, annotated and footnoted; cultures and blood tests, so to speak, of your life from babyhood up are put on record. It is the tyranny of so-called efficiency, as "The Crimson" says, the Prussianism of the dotted line.

New York Herald-Tribune.