PRO AND CON

Questiounaires are a fad. Nevertheless the propensity to inquire into other people's business acquires a significance divorced from the unpleasant character of a fetish if the knowledge sought is not cloyed with a mass of irrelevance: Many polls on the question of drinking are weighted with requests for information about various environmental influences, which, interesting as they may be to the psychologist, have little significance in relation to the fundamental free choice idea of any mass government.

In the CRIMSON poll an attempt has been made to include as few of the reasons for thinking thus and thus, as possible, without altogether omitting the circumstances which influence the choice. In doing so some small amount of interesting data is lost; but the resulting simplicity, clarity, and absolutism of the answers is correspondingly increased. A distinction between drinking and drunkenness is made with the hope that the voters can differentiate between excess and temperance. Such qualifications as "frequently", "occasionally", and "moderately", are omitted as being too vague, and in the end proving little. Likewise information as to the alcoholic likes and dislikes of the student's progenitors are omitted because of their relative unimportance in a poll whose purpose is to gather undergraduate facts and opinions.

Perhaps the only indefinite section of the questionnaire is that in which the voter may conceal various sins from dislike of alcoholic beverages to difficulty in striking a bargain with the local bootleggers under the guise of "Personal Taste". Such a situation is will nigh unavoidable and it is of secondary importance anyway. The major virtue of the ballot lies into its adaptability to various types of colleges, a fact illustrated by the adoption of its essential simplicity by many of the newspapers cooperating in the conducting of polls elsewhere.