CULTURE AT NEW HAVEN

Yale owes a vote of thanks to Mr. Donald Ogden Stewart, author of "Chester Merriwell at Yale" published in the current "Vanity Fair". Mr. Stewart suggests that Harvard and Yale have changed places with respect to culture and athletic prowess;--"Yale men discussing literature, Harvard winning football games," "Doesn't that prove that something is wrong with the college?", asks the horrified Yale graduate when he hears from his younger brother, Chester Merriwell, what has happened to his alma mater.

A year ago, after the football game, a dietist announced that the reason for Yale's defeat was the lack of certain nutritive elements in Connecticut food and water. This excuse was tacitly accepted by all; but the true result of the situation has just been pointed out: the supposedly stray calories have gone to build brain. Mr. Stewart, discoverer of this fact, frankly admits that Yale has now gained intellectual ascendency over Harvard, due to the new social prominence accorded the savant in New Haven. Not that culture is sought for its own sake; no, praise God. "Yale is Yale, and Yale men are Yale men",--world without end, amen.

Mr. Stewart's discovery of "certain curious changes in two of our leading colleges" is not without significance on this most significant day. It is an obvious corollary of his discovery that if Yale goes in for culture, if the Elis are now spending the small hours of the night "bickering about realism", football at New Haven can not be considered of such vital importance as in the days of old. Whether Yale has turned to culture like a love-starved woman to religion, whether the recent ascendency of Harvard on the gridiron is the cause or the effect of this "curious change", we can not say. But we trust that we will not be considered unduly optimistic if we suggest that after today Yale may be even more ardent in its wooing of the Muses.