NO MORE BUGGY RIDES

Of the two reasons offered by Princeton authorities for their ban on student-driven and owned automobiles, one is paradoxical and the other open to question. The fact that there has been a "frequency of fatal accidents" in Princeton is not common to that town alone. The law, by establishing an age limit which happens to be under that of the average undergraduate, has apparently given the student a legal right to drive a car. Therefore in forbidding automobiles at Princeton on the count of reckless driving, the university appears to take the stand that pursuit of learning and not tender years is responsible for accidents. Such perverse application of results of modern education is hardly plausible, even from a rigid dean.

As to the second point--the effect of the automobile on standards of scholarship, records at Princeton would seem to prove its validity. Nevertheless the ratio of low grades to the number of automobiles in a university is governed--as in all such proportions of virtue as opposed to temptation--by the strength of character which the individual possesses. To prevent a student of high ranking from driving an automobile is to give unpleasant medicine to a healthy person. If automobiles do affect scholarship they should be forbidden to those on whom the effect is unfortunate--the others might in all justice remain happy in their enjoyment of the wages of virtue.