GOOD COPY

The recent and regrettable death by his own hands of a Princeton sophomore raises the number of student suicides since January to twenty-six. In suite of the fact that his action was probably due in the main to ill health, and can hardly be said to indict Princeton's social or educational system, the already much discussed whys and wherefores of the epidemic have revived.

Many and various have been the theories as to the causes for these deaths. On them have been prepared general indictments of our whole psychology, philosophy, and social system. Clergymen lay the blame on materialism, lack of religious training, breakdown of family life. Others lay it to incomplete education, as evidence of the dangers of half-knowledge. Freudians smugly smile, and talk of repressions. There is a general "I told you so" air about them all. Whatever way it is regarded, though, the situation seems to cast reflection upon college education.

But we are not yet convinced that the situation is terrifying or even extraordinary. It does not seem much more sane to find an underlying cause for twenty-six suicides, than to try to prepare vital statistics from twenty-six isolated deaths. Nor are we sure that the percapita suicide pate is higher in colleges now than it was say twenty years ago. It approximates about one suicide to 5,000 students. It is not at all surprising that increase in the gross number of suicides should come with the tremendous increase in the number of students in college. Furthermore, even a per capita increase would not be surprising in view of the fact that new social strata invading the field of higher education, strata composed of individuals whose early environment has not prepared them for sudden immersion in the cold bath of new and complex ideas.

The present alarm may not unfairly be laid to a much less deep-seated reason than most of those advanced, namely--newspaper publicity. During the past decade colleges have become news. Nor has newspaper interest in them helped their reputation. For they have become news much as Peaches Browning and Gertrude Ederle are news. It is nothing new to say that most of the evils of college football can be laid to the newspapers which magnify the sport and deify the players beyond all reason. A Los Angeles newspaper proclaimed Harvard's recent imbroglio in three inch headlines across the front page of an edition on green paper. The whole space in four representative Boston papers devoted to the really great innovation in education of which the Overseers approved a week ago would probably not aggregate a column--certainly not two.

We do not say that the recent suicides ought not to be seriously considered in the hope of putting a stop to any future occurrences of such sort. We feel merely that the publicity they have received has magnified their importance, and provided manna for alarmists. And it is all because the man in the street is not interested in French requirements or the Tutorial system, but a student suicide is hot stuff, and merely confirms his ideas of college as a haven of hip flasks, atheism, and general immorality.