Harkness Hoot Denounces Yale's New Million-Dollar Gothic Buildings--Attacks "Bogus Elizabethan Mansions" on Campus

New Haven, Nov. 3--Yale's million-dollar Gothic buildings were made the butt of an attack today by the Harkness Hoot, literary magazine sponsored by two Eli undergraduates. Today's issue was the second the Hoot has published.

William Harlan Hale, one of the editors, berated the university in an essay of eight pages for building in the style of a bygone day. "No man and no nation who possessed a life-giving creative sense ever dreamed of copying the previous age", he said. "We associate the phenomenon of imitation with people who are sterile, with eras that whose tendency is retrogression and atavism."

Hale finds the greatest inspiration in factories, power houses, bridges, and skyscrapers, all of which he regards as far more American and alive than what is medieval and European. In particular he attacked the new Sterling Library, which Yale regards as her best piece of architecture. The essay says, "Few works can equal it as a monument of lifelessness and decadence none can surpass it in extravagance and falsity."

The Hoot also gibed at the "girder-Gothic" which its editor claims has turned the library into a "fortress." The architects are severely criticized for squandering money on "bogus Elizabethan mansions" for students who have no desire to live in them.

Today's issue of the Harkness Hoot included, in addition to the eight-page essay, a pictorial section of eight more pages. If continued the attack on the Harkness gift which is making possible the inauguration of the House Plan in New Haven.