NOT THE WHOLE TRUTH

As usual during the season when football monopolizes the sports columns, the editors of the rest of the paper find every bit of information about colleges particularly appetizing. In this vicinity especially, the front pages went quite berserk over the meat furnished by yesterday's Carnegie Foundation report. To be sure, the columnists and editorial writers generally concurred in the what-of-it attitude merited by much of this report of conditions prevalent months or years ago; but the treatment as news is, after all, what makes the impression of the story, and even conservative papers badly exaggerated its significance.

Yet the Carnegie report was of intercollegiate and, to a certain extent, of public importance. Two other items played up during the past week were not. The three-column "Stunt Riot at Harvard" headline of a Boston paper last Thursday led a story that deliberately over-emphasized one incident of the initiations until there appeared to be a race-riot seething under the surface at Harvard Square. The bold-face story on "Kindergarten Treatment" in another paper yesterday related a mild disciplinary action such as has often occurred in English 2, and is utterly without importance outside of the classroom. Thus far the freedom of the instructor to conduct his classes has been recognized by University Hall, and there is no reason for the world at large to be concerned with that matter.

Harvard is afflicted beyond most colleges with this aggravation of the trivial. With few exceptions, the press selects anti-Harkness Lampoons, weird Socialist pronouncements, and the peccadilloes of one club, as its Harvard news. The domestic affairs of Harvard are paraded; the legitimate news is buried under the indifference of the press.