ENOUGH ROPE

Educational concern, an reflected in accompanying clippings from the Press still faces old problems with old bromidioms. Though democracy can lead boys to college in great numbers, educators still complain that, like the proverbial horse and the watering trough, it cannot make them think. "Too many men go to college without any real fitness for higher education or capacity of profiting by it," declares President Comfort of Haverford College. His answer to the question is a concentration on "quality rather than quantity", more individual attention to a smaller group. Other conventional panaceas are: to raise scholastic requirements before and during college, or, secondly, to effect, by contact with culture, a change of undergraduate heart.

The "Yale News" in an editorial stand for a liberalizing of the cut system at Yale, suggests the idea, prevalent in the colleges, that given enough rope, the Great Unwilling will eventually hang itself. Unfortunately, here, as in other walks of life, it is a case of divided to fall, united to stand. Given enough rope, enough cooperation, enough seasoned catch-words, and the hardened suicide can live through any system fabricated. Show a few gentlemen C's, worn with just a touch of the Gentleman Ranker and the Spree, and membership to the Federation of Non-Labor is free of charge.

These various attitudes towards the various types of college opportunity form the Imponderabilia of a college. They are the Invisible college. Housing, Russian tintinnabulation, and interior decoration--these are the Impedimenta, the necessary solutions for problems much less difficult and already opulently solved. Hopefully, Yale looks to a liberalizing of the cut system to cure or kill. Harvard, not less plutocratic than the majority of America's colleges, with its increasing expenses, and its obvious goose-stepping with the general trend toward a greater display of material wealth, this Harvard is still waiting for a liberal cut system to do more than emphasize the main dilemma.