Unusually rapt and breathless was the attention that three Harvard students were giving to one of their lecturers one day last week. Their pencils poised industriously, following his every word, they took careful notes, glanced knowingly at each other. But their jottings were brief. Their real work came when the lecture was over: when, surrounded by a group of their fellows, they added up the marks they had made on their papers.
These students were members of Professor Irving ("New Humanism") Babbitt's lecture course, Comparative Literature II. Basing their operations on the large number of writers that he mentioned in his lectures, they were conducting a lottery, selling tickets numbered from 1 to 100 at 10¢ each. Holder of the ticket which tallied with Professor Babbitt's total for the day would win the sweepstakes, minus 10% commission to the promoters.* The average number of writers the professor mentioned was 47. But one day he set a record: 73 quotations, from writers so various as St. Paul, Confucius, Dante, Walter Lippmann.
When the Harvard Crimson exposed the lottery, newshawks sought to discover what Professor Babbitt would do about it. He could not be reached but Mrs. Babbitt said: "Why, he won't pay any attention to the lottery. He'll go right along just as he always does. . . . He is never surprised at what Harvard students do."
* Many a collegian recollects similar sweepstakes: on length of sermons in chapel, on combinations of hymn numbers, etc., etc. Yale students in the undergraduate architecture course given by genial, pudgy, goateed Dean Everett Victor Meeks of the Yale School of Fine Arts once made use of his predilection for the expression tour de force (feat of strength) by getting up pools on its daily occurrence in his lectures.