WITH OR WITHOUT

The Honor System, which has lately been the pivot of a small tempest at Yale, is now on the lap of the gods. The Student Council is weary of thanklessly juggling the university's morals and has sought deliverance from its travails. The Faculty shows no enthusiasm for a return to Faculty supervision in the sense of watching for cribbers, but will not tolerate a total absence of regulation. Finally, the undergraduates themselves have arrived at a state of general apathy concerning the issue.

The present dilemma is the result of the Campus Referendum last week at New Haven by the Student Council. In the first place, out of 1608 men in the three upper classes, only 772 voted. Secondly, the ballot revealed that the supporters of a return to Faculty supervision were in a six-to-one minority, while the advocates of no supervision totalled a comfortable plurality. The present Honor System was indifferently supported. Finally, however, when the Student Council discovered from the Dean that there was not a chance in a million of the Faculty's ever approving the absence of any regulatory system, it wisely turned the whole thing over to the Faculty without comment. And, as The Yale Alumni Weekly points out, that body will in the near future probably restore itself to the temporarily suspended capacity of "guardians of undergraduate honesty."

Inasmuch as the Yale Student Council and the Yale undergraduates cannot strike a happy medium between Faculty supervision and no supervision, it might be pointed out that the former as practiced at Harvard is certainly the lesser of two evils. While it is generally admitted that the Faculty of any university would free itself from what it considers a disagreeable duty, yet the artificial standards by which modern learning must unfortunately be protected seem to demand it. As for the undergraduates, the majority of whom are honest, they can and do remain personally indifferent to what machinery is set up to prevent cribbing, as has been proved at Yale. On the other hand, the policy of no supervision is merely a concession to the minority, those who detract from the value of education and are themselves least in accord with the desired scholastic attitude.