Dissenting Opinion

The daily press--haloing the "Times" and "Tribune", the "Sun" and the "Post", New Haven locals with a glamour that we like to feel--the daily press has been haunted recently with tales of growing liberalism in the Universities. Reading, one is lured to belief in the actual existence of a younger generation, one significant entity, await in action, impatient with the blunderings of the past.

And what is one in expect?

In business, scrambled greediness will gather itself into a centralized thrusting toward economic order. In politics, scattered selfishness in individual and the party will resolve itself in leadership and party movement, bombast-free, expressive of a nation's urge and conscious of a world. In education old distrust and rule-made pattern moulding will take for granted the individual student's been demand to educate himself, and teachers and scholars will discover self-respect. In art and architecture the merely startling and the ugly, all false pretension, will give place to a living sense of beauty expressive of desire and present need. In literature the myth of theory will disappear before the earnest talking of one man. And, above all, a constant hurry after serious nothings will seem insane, and there will be leisure and time for self-knowledge and conversation and understanding...So and so asserts this knocking headline ghost of college thought that, set free on graduation, will first upset and them restore the country.

But to turn from paper-ghosts to a glancing out the window for a moment, to shut out whispers for real words, what does New Haven, for example, reveal? Where or What is this "younger generation"?

In business? What job can I get, and Where will I fit are the major cries, and the competitive instinct bread by long concern with social activities, intensity in sport,--both present day Wall Street stalking the campus in sprit if not in form,--suggest the approach that will be made, the ruts that will be eagerly followed. In politics? Save for this most recent manifestation of interest, a disarmament neil, controlled and run by a small Christian minority shaking an earnest American student first at immoral French nationalism, the tonic is of little concern; there is no realization nor desire to realize that a living government is the expression of a people's will and dead issues in terms of dead leaders and dead parties reflect at best a quite normal acquaintance with morning headlines: socialism is a nurse-maid's tale, for naughty boys. In education? Now that the college authorities themselves.--while not entirely forgetful of ancient fears, distrust expressed in frequent tests and the primitive cut system for checking forced attendance,--have taken action to give more freedom to students, set time aside for more extensive reading, abolished the threat of mid-year examinations, their gesture is given small encouragement: the "News", an intelligent voicer of average student opinion, has more than once expressed its disapproval of over-intellectualization. It sighs for the old safety of daily assignment, daily checking, and no worry. The social advantages of Yale, kindly paid for by the state, must be preserved from educational menace. In architecture? Our tongues are tired, please look. In art? A small group is able to work unashamed in the almost unexceptional tolerance that the Yale student will at least show all things. In literature? Perhaps, where education is still fingered as an interesting shell for remote inspection, not held to the ear whispering: men have created, this is their creation, you must create.--it is not wonderful to find that empty theory, interesting sham, and pure parade are still greater than individual expression, simplicity and directness; the monster form still lisps its incongruously pretty and hollow words. And leisure? No, the point of college life is still to escape one's self: extra-curricular activities, movies, innocent what-you-wills are grasped at eagerly, O so seriously, to avoid the horror of an empty moment for conversation, reading, or for thought...And as for understanding: there is hardly time for that.?

It is safe to predict that the sacred pillars of American society are in no immediate danger of being shaken by our own weak ghost of so-called college liberalism, campus revolts and stirrings. But it is still good to read of it in the daily press. --The Harkness Hoot.