To the Editor of the Crimson:

Before the vacation the University was asked to continue the privilege of free auditing of courses through the summer term. It has been asked to do so several times since then. So far the University has refused to reconsider the question. Soon we can expect them to say, "Well, it's too late now to do anything about it." It is not too late and it can never be too late to drop a ruling which forbids a regular student to drop in and listen to an occasional lecture in a course in which he is not enrolled without paying an additional fee.

The reason the rule was adopted, officials say, is because the cost of each half course has been reduced and it was therefore considered justifiable especially as it had been used in the Summer School in previous years. Actually the price per course is higher than it has been in past summer sessions although most of the Harvard faculty is not being paid for work done over the summer, and the University has many more students than they had expected.

To adopt a rule which tends to eliminate all "browsing" in other fields and which hinders men attempting, without tutorial, to prepare themselves for divisionals and a thesis is worse than short-sighted, particularly when the average student must sacrifice his liberal course work to the Math and Physics needed for military training. Free auditing has always been one of the main ways of filling curricular gaps and that is more important now than ever.

If the University persists in keeping the law on the books, I hope students will attend lectures in disregard of it, and I hope that no professor will allow a student to be expelled from a lecture which he had the intellectual curiosity to attend. Roger D. Fisher '43.