President Lowell of Harvard University, who sometimes seems very close to the stern, unbending Puritan of tradition, has yielded one step to the protest of Harvard graduates and undergraduates against the intention to omit from the new Harvard Memorial Chapel any mention of the three Harvard graduates who died fighting in the German armies. The chapel will be a monument to the men who gave their lives in the Allied cause, but there will be room in it for a tablet to the three Germans, all of whom, as it happens, died before the United States entered the World War.
The decision will seem wise, for the chapel will inevitably in the long run be primarily a memorial to heroism, and the spirit of sacrifice was surely present in both lines of trenches. Only those are surprised that Columbia now resumes its exchange professorship with the University of Berlin who had supposed that the old bond had long ago been reforged. President Lowell, surely, will find all Harvard alumni with him in his readiness to forecast the reconciliation of the future.
"The Harvard CRIMSON," organ of undergraduate opinion, which led the battle for a memorial to the German dead, has also fought the proposal to give the war memorial the form of a chapel occupying much of the remaining open green space in the Harvard Yard. Graduates too have protested and wondered whether the World Way Memorial might not in some way be linked with the great hall built in memory of the Civil War dead, which now stands, an empty, unused shelf, in the heart of the busy Harvard settlement. But that is a question upon which outsiders may hesitate to express opinion: even the Harvard graduates and undergraduates who have ventured to have opinions of their own, have discovered that their comment was unwelcome. N. Y. Herald Tribune.
Read more in News
THE PRICE OF PEACE