NEW YORK PAPERS DIFFER ON SIGNIFICANCE OF COLLEGE VOTE

Below is the comment of the New York Sun:

"Very unconvincing are the efforts of the League partisans to draw any support for their side from the figures of the poll of colleges. Some 158,000 votes were cast out of a possible half-million in colleges, professional a schools and normal schools. The vote therefore, represented only a minor part of the whole voice of the institutions of higher education. A minority, it must not be taken too readily as the voice of a representative sentiment. Who knows that the abstaining two-thirds think?

"On its face, as far as that goes, the ballot shows an extraordinarily even division. Almost equal thirds stand respectively for full ratification on the Wilson basis, for absolute refusal to accept that basis or a compromise, and for a compromise settlement. The last proposal runs a few thousands ahead of the other two. Did this division furnish a true sample of the state of mind of the whole nation, we should be forced to find in it an evidence of pronounced and central cleavage. Anyway, the vote is two to one against the League in its present shape.

"Even so, the colleges cannot be taken as coinciding in all respects with that of the nation as a whole. For reasons of class feeling the college public feels kindly disposed toward that brilliant example of its own scholasticism, Woodrow Wilson. Its leaders and student body have for years built up in their minds the pre-disposing background for acceptance of Wilsonian ideas. Moreover, the scholastic fatuity for generalization, natural to their methods of thought, renders college intellects susceptible to the merits of principle that any Wilson scheme is sure to contain, and dull to the faults of application.

"It would follow that the college vote must run far more favorable to the League plan than would the total of enlightened sentiment outside the school walls. Yet even within them only a scant one-third support the Wilson position."