Down upon the dining students of Harvard's Lowell House stare portraits of poet James Russell Lowell, President emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Astronomer Percival Lowell. The dining students of Lowell House stare down upon their plates and grumble that the Lowells would never stand for such food. Last week Head Tutor Elliott Perkins of Lowell House received from the student House Committee a formal, itemized account of the evils of House food. The cream: sour. The butter: rancid. The haddock: wormy. The milk: warm. The eggs: bad. The toast: cold. The vegetables: wet. The stew meat: gristly. The chicken: hacked instead of carved.
In the wainscoted dining halls of six other Harvard Houses, students grumble daily about the same bad food. That Lowell grumbled loudest was, perhaps, because it is the most articulate, most distinctive, most prematurely hoary of Harvard's new Houses. No sooner had Lowell House been built five years ago than its spirited little Master, Professor Julian Lowell Coolidge, who pedals dexterously through Cambridge traffic on a bicycle, set out to give his House a Personality. Today Lowellians wear House neckties, bowl upon the quadrangle green, clang the tuneless Russian bells in the House tower, wear dinner jackets when they dine at High Table. Lowell House is dominated by students who prepared mostly at Exeter and Andover. clear- eyed young men who like to run House teams, House dances. House lectures.
Whether to choose Lowell or one of the other Houses was a question which Harvard's 900-odd freshmen found almost as important last week as the question of choosing a college had seemed a year before. Harvardmen now spend their first year in the bare, old dormitories of the Yard, apply in the spring for admission to a House. Their choices (besides Lowell):
Dunster, with Eliot, draws most of the graduates of exclusive private schools like Groton, St. Mark's, St. Paul's, Milton. Its atmosphere is that of a gentleman's club, fairly democratic within itself.
Dunster men bother little with House activities, do their dancing at Boston "deb" parties.
Eliot, newest, biggest, "snootiest" of the Houses, draws the same type of youth as Dunster, but is cut up into social cliques. Three years ago its Master, Professor Roger Bigelow ("Frisky") Merriman, showed such zeal in entertaining socially desirable freshmen that other House Masters complained that he was violating a tacit taboo against proselyting. Result was that the Dean's Office took over the job of assigning freshmen to Houses, switched squads of private school men away from Eliot and Dunster. With the social balance somewhat evened, the Masters last year got back with restrictions, the privilege of picking their own House members.
Kirkland started off badly as Harvard's "social desert." First thing the Dean's Office did when it began Housing freshmen was to induce a big group of young socialites (including Theodore Roosevelt III) to pioneer in Kirkland. After one year most of them (including Theodore Roosevelt III) moved out. Today most of Kirkland's residents come out of public schools.
Adams, made up of old dormitories on the "Gold Coast," seems to be develop-ing an intellectual, somewhat "arty" flavor.