THE GENTLEMEN WITH A DUSTER

For the last month the editorial and communication column of the Yale 'News' has been the no-man's land in the struggle between the reformists and their more conservative opponents, with the "News" itself leading the reform campaign. Its platform is the abolition of compulsory chapel and the bestowal of unlimited cuts on those of high scholarship. One feature of this campaign was a straw vote which showed undergraduate opinion to be decisively in support of the proposed reforms.

With voluntary chapel and the "Dean's list", both traditions here, we can look on at the war of words as patients to whom the pill has already been administered and who are "doing nicely, thank you". The place of respect which the chapel holds, and the continuing good scholarship of those once on the "Dean's List" as well as Its incentive toward better work, are enough to brave the wisdom of the University's liberalism. We are inclined to wonder with the Yale "News", if "perhaps Yale's authorities delight in cobwebs", since the faculty hesitates so long before dusting out these corners.

Paternalism is the prime fault that Europeans criticize in American universities. The administration has its finger in every student pie, as the foreigner sees it. The tendency has been for the authorities to make the path too well defined; the modern idea is to give the individual more and more freedom, to place the student more on his own responsibility, and to cut down the "you must" attitude. The "News", in one of its editorials favoring the adoption of the resolutions, takes the same position on compulsory chapel that is recognized hare. "The purpose of a church service is to benefit the soul. Does Sunday chapel do this?" "Only a reactionary groups of men, pettishly tyrannic, can leave such an incubus saddled upon a university." Under the suggested change in the cut system "the undergraduate would understand that he is at college to learn something, not to expose his plastic self to the mould of a gigantic stamping machine".