Down at Yale

The half-humorous and half-serious protests by some undergraduates and a few alumni which followed President Lowell's announcement of Edward S. Harkness's gift of The Harvard Houses have largely subsided. But the controversy has broken out anew and with perhaps increased vehemence at Yale to which Mr. Harkness has promised as many millions as President Angell, in his wisdom, shall decide are required to fulfill "the quadrangle plan." Substantially, Harvard's "house plan" and Yale's "quadrangle plan" are the same. Each provides for the division of the old college into several units, containing living quarters for about two hundred men and resident professors and tutors, promoting a more congenial atmosphere between faculty and students and affording opportunities for friendships among students who are not now likely to meet. In short, the idea is to combine the social advantages of the small college with the resources and opportunities of the large university.

But the Yale Record, like its Cantabrigian counterpart, The Harvard Lampoon, has seen fit to ridicule the plan, and several undergraduates and younger alumni have contributed severe criticism to the columns of The Yale Daily News. The chief danger which they profess to detect is an undesirable "paternalism" which would force youths of varied origins and interests into an unwelcome intimacy, seriously interfere with the freedom of fraternities and other social organizations and possibly restrict the students to a boarding-house existence of prescribed hours of meals, study and sleep. In other words, it is charged that the proposed system, admittedly designed to help lonely and inconspicuous students, would emasculate the rather heartless competition or "rugged individualism" that now produces "Yale men."

That men who were or still are "prominent in undergraduate life" should object is fairly obvious. They have succeeded in athletics or other extra-curricular activities and have reaped and enjoyed the rewards--fame and homage, election to senior fraternities, appointment to class offices, picture-in-the-paper, "done most for Yale," and all that sort of thing. It is unreasonable to expect them to see anything wrong in a system that has been so generous to them. It is reasonable for them to forget that there are hundreds, possibly thousands of young men--and it is this majority which the faculty knows of and is thinking of--for whom college has been disappointing, even a failure. Yale is perfect as it is now: why change it?. And added to this natural conservatism there is likely at New Haven a prejudice against anything that looks like an imitation of a Harvard idea.

Several hundred alumni at New Haven Saturday heard President Angell give a comprehensive exposition of the plan, with as many definite details as such a colossal program, now barely planned in outline, permits. Boston Herald.