It appears from the announcement of President Lowell that Harvard University is definitely committed to the plan of subdividing its undergraduate body into small residential groups, somewhat remotely after the Oxford and Cambridge model. The program has been drawn up, the die is cast, and we shall see what we shall see. . . . .

The most important of these social obstacles arises from the initial necessity of an arbitrary allotment of students to form the various groups or "houses." It is the purpose of the Harvard authorities, probably a wise one, to make each "house" a cross-section in personnel of the college as a whole. Their selection of the men who are to live together will, therefore, cut across the grooves in which undergraduate social life naturally flows. This poses the question whether as a result there can be any real cohesion within the new groupings, without which, it is plain, they will fail utterly to function as intended. For the whole idea behind the experiment is an enhancement of education through social contacts to rescue the individual from submergence in the mass, to put him where he may enjoy daily social intercourse with members of the faculty and of other classes, and so sharpen his wits and his intellectual curiosity. Obviously, to carry it but there must be besides provision for physical propinquity in dormitory and commons, an esprit de corps which actually persuades the various elements in each of the new academic families that they enjoy one another's society and "there is no place like home."

The spirit of emulation, as President Lowell points out in his last annual report, should help to accomplish this--the desire of each "house" to achieve intellectual and athletic distinction in rivalry with its fellows. But this will not suffice, in our judgment, unless as soon as possible after the "houses" have been established and the first few allotments made the faculty allows the students themselves every reasonable freedom in choosing to which groups they will adhere. Nothing so strongly persuades a human being to "brighten the corner" where he is as the fact that he picked it. --New York Herald-Tribune.