THE ONE AND THE MANY

Harvard stops at ostentation, Yale at baggy trousers, Dartmouth at the end of the ski-jump, and Radcliffe at practically nothing. Such, in the monotonous nutshell, are the findings of a group of advanced psychology students from three of these four leaves of the New England clover of culture. Admittedly, and time spent pondering on the intrinsic meaning of the word "advanced psychologists" is a waste of time. The important matter before the readers yesterday of the Front Page, Valhalla of the Fourth Estate, was that the inmates of these four institutions have been forever set apart as types. There is no retort; the decision is irrevocable, and the modern Freudians have once more blasted a very workable set of inhibitions enjoyed by undergraduates.

Harvard men are snobbish, aesthetic, indifferent, blase, indolent, sloppily dressed, and proud of an anglophile accent. The novelty of such conjectures by these devotees of James and Neitzsche is no whit more surprising than their dictum that the breed infesting the environs of Cambridge is also democratic, lacking in artistic appreciation, interested in life, naive, go-getters, and good American boys. They are attired faultlessly. That is the indictment of Dartmouth and the sisters sufficiently far across the common. Dartmouth, according to the consensus of opinion expressed by its contemporaries is one long Wah-hoo-Wah plus a touching love for the great outdoors. Radcliffe is unutterably Radcliffe. As for Yale--it is a generally accepted fact that the bulldogs are a healthy lot, nicely mediocre, and the backbone of the nation. The psychologists shed no new light on that subject.

Taken all in all--if it must be taken--the situation is discouraging. Audacious, with his alphabetical system, was summarily tossed off as in ill-mannered diletante. But when scholars of a most advanced and complex science, after impaling human specimens for their study, induce, (it's largely a matter of induction, the scientific approach, no less), their findings cannot be gainsaid. The die is cast, Sophoclean fate has decreed, and the New England tetrology are distinct types, like it or no.

Incidentally, the self-appointed critics are now free to wend their way out of the Augean stables. Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and Radcliffe are cleansed from any taint of originality. There is no retort--except, possibly, the rather ineffectual expedient of mentioning the Eleventh Commandment, whose essence is concerned mostly with minding one's business.