SPEAKING OF DEANS

Exciting bits of information arrive from France, via Associated Press, regarding the student demonstrations over the suspension of the Sorbonne Law School dean, M. Louis Borthelmy. Fifty-thousand students in eighteen universities strike, six thousand indulge in an orderly demonstration, petitions to everything and everybody are circulating like hot cakes.

The first impulse of the unthinking average student when deprived of a dean more or less would be to shout for joy. But the French are different. The dispatches are meagre in details of why the dean was suspended, but evidently the students feel they have been deprived of the inalienable right to be deaned. They are fighting for university prerogatives say the reports and not the least of these is the right to be advised and reproved when occasion demands. In crises like this, when the whole fabric of education totters on the brink of ruin, one can not but rejoice in the fact that the demonstrations in front of the dean's house were orderly. Nothing was lost but an Apache cap and a false beard worn by a student under the age limit for embryo lawyers.

The Chamber of Deputies has debated the Law Faculty incidents, and has ended with a vote of confidence. That is the right note to strike--confidence. Somehow one feels sure that the students of the Sorbonne will not languish long without a dean.