Lowell's Lessons

Octogenarian Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Harvard's ex-president (1909-1933), has spent a long and active life disproving the axiom that a burned child dreads the fire. The scalding he got when he protested Louis D. Brandeis' appointment to the U. S. Supreme Court for "lack of judicial temperament" did not deter him from getting himself into hot water again by proposing a quota for Jewish students at Harvard and barring Negroes from freshmen dormitories. He went on to become embroiled in the Sacco-Vanzetti case as the target of libertarians' scorn. Last year, when he demanded that the Government suppress sitdown strikes, Massachusetts Labor sharply reminded him of Harvard's underpaid scrubwomen. Latest scorching for white-mustached old Dr. Lowell was the revocation last year of his automobile driving license, after he had once flunked a test, twice crashed into other motorists.

Of unusual interest, therefore, was the publication last week of a book by Dr. Lowell called What a University President Has Learned.* Lowell fans who may have expected a penitent confession and prophetic insight distilled from his ordeal by fire were, however, disappointed. Dr. Lowell at 81 still thinks, for example, despite the contrary findings of modern psychologists, that Latin, Greek and mathematics are the most valuable subjects for training youngsters to think. He believes it is better for a boy to learn French by formal methods in the U. S. than by talking with Frenchmen in Paris, for a boy who learns by the second method "has had no more mental discipline than a little street Arab in a foreign town." Still stanchly Tory, he sums up his social views: "Truly the future has less to fear from individual than from cooperative selfishness."

Sample platitudes and homely phrases: "To essay too much at once may, by arousing opposition, imperil the plan." "In stead of applying the principle of self-education there has been too much drag ging of youth over the ground in perambulators and wondering why their running does not improve," An epigram Dr. Lowell borrows may be borrowed also by un friendly biographers as his epitaph: "We pride ourselves on being a practical people -- which Disraeli somewhere described as men who practice the errors of their ancestors."

*Macmillan ($1.75).

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