Education: Unsavoury

Parental eyebrows went up, concern was felt, when a committee, composed of faculty and undergraduate members of six universities and colleges in greater Boston, published a report on living conditions in the students’ area of Back Bay. Said the investigators:

“It is a well-known fact . . . that the living conditions are far from what the faculties of the schools and parents of the students would have them if they were aware. . . .

“Young men and young women are, through force of circumstances, living with less protection from moral temptation than is desirable. It is known that, in some places where men and women students live in the same house, there is very lax supervision and that the frequenting of one another’s rooms, both during day and night, is not at all unheard of.”

Charges of mixed apartment parties, with gambling and drinking, were made. Charges of club dances, with “very considerable” amounts of drinking. Charges of robing and disrobing before unshaded windows.

“It is maintained by some girl students that they cannot pass through certain of our streets without being accosted by men.”

The investigators, who represented Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, Northeastern University, Tufts College and Emerson College of Oratory, recommended greater restraint and vigilance by the college authorities, stricter rules, appointment of “personal directors,” a ban on liquors at “social affairs” and “suitable sex lectures.”

Said critics: “In a metropolitan student community, some such phenomena seem virtually inevitable even at this stage in the advancement of the race. One wonders, however, why bad taste must be given publicity beyond the sphere of its occurrence.”