TO HEAVEN WITH YALE!

According to Yale tradition, when Vanderbilt Hall was built at the far end of the campus it was the first undergraduate dormitory to have plumbing and running water installed. Previously the campus pump had served all ablutionary and minor beverage requirements, winter in and summer out. The luxury of the projected Vanderbilt outraged the Yale alumni to the point of frenzy and many were the heated protests against its brass faucets and hot showers. What was Yale coming to? Such gilded youth as these would never beat Harvard in football. Running water indeed! In their time, etc.

Times have changed, however, and if recent press dispatches are to be credited, Dean Frederick Sheetz Jones has announced the possible erection of an academic skyscraper in the center of Yale campus which will overshadow Nathan Hale and Connecticut and even the hated purlieus of Hush Hall. Shades of Timothy Dwight! How will God-Bless-You Mary ever collect her washing and how will Jerry deliver the Lit and the Oldest College Daily at the twentieth floor? Why by express elevator of course, and the undergraduate of the future will lounge elegantly about in libraries, billiard parlors and sun rooms hundreds of feet above the site of the historic Sophomore fence. As Dean Jones pointed out, the University of Pittsburgh has a skyscraper; why shouldn't Yale?

At this rate of progress and elevation New Haven will soon be able to boast the projected bronze bull dog (to be joined by a leash to "hanc statuam"), a new set of blue lions for the oval and perhaps a correspondence school of cinema photography. Columbia has one! We can even foresee the time when the only relics of yesteryear that Yale can boast will be Professor Beers and compulsory chapel. May the author of "The Ways of Yale", however, long outlive the less noble institution!

Nevertheless, we cannot but believe that Dean Jones has his tongue in his cheek, as the saying goes. Architectural monstrosities are not entirely unheard of at New Haven, and we are painfully conscious of a certain synthetic symmetry not a hundred miles from Plympton Street. But we have a feeling that there would be bloodshed at New Haven before the foundations of a campus skyscraper could be laid and, we would be tempted to assist at a little sniping among the structural steel workers ourselves if ever the construction rose above the third floor.