YALE SOLIDARITY

The Yale Alumni Weekly in considering the elephantosis which now is afflicting Yale even as it is affecting every other large university sees in the small college plan suggested by the Student Council Committee on Education here no panacea for the ills of Yale. Nor are these ills those which have worried the Committee of the Student Council.

What Yale fears is not that there be too little chance for that acquaintanceship on the perpendicular plane which the Committee believes is a vital need at Harvard but rather the loss of what has been called "Yale solidarity". With numbers forcing the chapel regulations to undergo a decided change at Yale the Alumni Weekly believes that the chance for such solidarity is departing Theater is nothing except the fraternity system, if one interprets the Weekly correctly, to blind the college together. So they suggest a further development of that system.

Perhaps that is the best method of continuing what has been one of the finest traditions at New Haven, none the less finer because of its dissimilarity from those at Harvard which would little emphasize solidarity in the social sense. To the alien ear it has a rather false ring. For fraternity systems which assumes such ramifications as to bind a college into a social unit usually stifle it.

Yale has a difficulty, to face which is not peculiarly her own in that she is glutted with students. And in that aspect above all lies interest for the Harvard undergraduate. For those who would oppose change of any kind either in curriculum, in choice of entrants, in form or function of the University too little realize how very necessary it is that the huge numbers who now want and can get an education must be assimilated into the life of the University Any methods which best assists in such assimilation must not have the abrupt disregard of those who forget how many there are who now desire what the University has and is unable in any huge amounts to give. Either the University becomes a factory or it attempts in some new way to meet a new situation.

If Yale is to continue Yale she must have her "social solidarity", if Harvard is to continue Harvard she must have her best traditions in full flourish. Therefore these suggestions from people interested in the future of their universities must not be taken with a grain of salt. They are vital and very necessary.