Harvard's $11,000,000 experiment in small-unit education, to be inaugurated next fall with 522 students in the new Dunster and Lowell houses, is holding the attention of those who think about educational progress. The New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor have already viewed the project favorably: they see desirability in splitting the huge masses of students at our great universities into more wiedly groups, at the same time retaining the skilled instruction and superior facilities of a large institution.

To us it is not clear just wherein lies the advantage of having the groups more wieldy, better organized. There will, perhaps, be more opportunity for the students to mingle with the faculty to have the lamp of truth in the very midst of their lives instead of only on the classroom fringe-for the so-called "inner-college" plan provides professors' rooms in the dormitories. This may prove a valuable stimulus to that class of students inherently brilliant, but also lazy, who would like to know some bother to find them.

It is probable, also, that well organized groups under the direction of an advisor-tutor will make the administration more efficient in imposing its ideas, it will, and its regulations on the student body. It seems to be a principle in the minds of today's higher educators that they, as well as the secondary educators, should have an outfit of morals and a standard of behavior to impart rather rigidly to their charges. Regimenting the students into a routine of dormitory living and eating seems to be as convenient a way as any of propagating the doctrine of the straight and narrow.

To The Daily a system of supervised dormitories for men hardly represents the ideal in student living quarters. For first-year men there may be an advantage in dormitories where they can make contacts and friendships, and possibly have some. Hollywood ideas of college corrected under tactful guidance, but the watchdog attitude that a dormitory supervisor is forced to assume should certainly not be carried beyond the freshman year. It stunts the development of self-reliance and self-discipline, both of which will be of equal importance with academic achievement when the student finds himself unshielded by his alma mater and at grips with the world for a living.

To us the new Harvard dormitories disguised as "Inner college" that are hardly more than a dignification and moralistic extension of the Harvard tutorial system, are significant only as more paternalism and increased floor space. After all Harvard would have been rather silly in the eyes of the world to turn down Mr. Edward F. Harkness' preferred eleven millions-even though he tied up the gift with the requirement that it must be used for student-faculty "houses." Michigan Daily.