Wallingford Methods

To the Editor of the New York Times:

For those Yale graduates who do not admire the bitterness of Yale University disputes, there is a charming ironv in the fact that the section of Yale alumni who have most deplored the principle of meddling with the affairs of the university have, in an effort to secure a just recognition of the splendid services of E. M. Woolley, coach of the Dramatic Association, themselves transgressed the bounds of graduate propriety.

. . . Never before in the history of Yale has such a group succeeded in dictating a faculty appointment after the Corporation had ruled against it. . . . Dr. Angell bowed to the storm. Mr. Woolley was appointed for another year, and the decision postponed until 1926, when Mr. Baker will have had a chance to show his powers, the passions of the moment will be cooled to the usual apathy of the non-professional graduate, and Mr. Woolley may be dropped quietly and this time efficiently.

Behind the Woolley-Baker controversy lay much rancor not generally known to the public. A section of Yale graduates has viewed with growing alarm the tendency, since 1920, to reorganize Yale out of all recognition, and the unfairly large burden assumed in the process by Mr. Harkness through his manifold benefactions to his alma mater. The sons of Eli are a stiff-necked breed and there are many who feel that for Yale to be rebuilt, reorganized and replenished by the devotion of any single graduate is unnecessary and undignified.

Moreover, in the hasty departure of Professor Baker from Cambridge to New Haven there was much which seemed unbecoming. To many of us it appeared a shrewd Yankee trick, similar to those business coups whereby one company lures away the consulting engineer or sales manager who have been the mainstay of a rival concern. Yale was not so poor in dramatic talent as to need such a quick turnover in her dramatic teaching. The result was that many who do not know Woolley or knowing him, have no great liking for him personally, used his resignation as their excuse to protest against the tendency on the part of a small group of loyal alumni to use the wealth as the determining factor in shaping the course of one of the Big Three of American education. The Baker acquisition was consummated with a furtiveness, haste and poor breeding which should find no place in matters of education.

The success of the revolting graduates will only have been justified if it induces the officers of Yale University to return from midwestern Wallingford methods to the classics, and to be justly apprehensive of those who come bearing gifts. Otherwise the reinstatement of Mr. Woolley will be only another instance of the great vice of American colleges; the unique influence exercised over details of administration by well-meaning but irresponsible graduates. John Carter. New York, May 20, 1925.   --New York Times.