THE UNDERTAKER'S SONG

Having demolished, brick by brick, the architectural monstrosities of Yale and fashioned, with some degree of acumen, a literary bludgeon against the social customs of that University, William Harlan Hale, co-editor of The Harkness Hoot has gone farther afield. He has taken Harvard and Princeton, along with Yale, to be his province, and widened his vehicle by means of the columns of the New Republic.

In the current issue, Mr. Hale deplores the passing of youthful radicalism. Examining his field, he has found that interest in politics is a memory, individualism in clothing a vanished tradition, and intelligence in undergraduate publications an anachronism. His argument, in fact, is that college men ape their elders sans discrimination or examination. His conclusions are brief: the House Plan at Harvard and at Yale will not minimize, will rather aggravate the present condition of ignorant indifference. The only solution, he feels, is the addition to a dogmatic faculty of a few liberal thinkers.

All of this may be true. A pattern in lieu of an individual may conceivably be the product of House units. And if faculties are such fools as the writer believes they may carelessly allow a hot-head or two to wiggle into their midst. In one of his minor digressions, Mr. Hale attacks Professor Babbitt of Harvard. From the tenor of the article, one might expect Professor Babbitt to be the epitome of the author's desires. Not a hot-head to be sure, but the humanist has on occasion provoked intelligent and original thinking; even his undergraduate opponents, and they are legion, will admit as much. Or does Mr. Hale desire agreement, rather than argument from the faculty?

That is a minor point. Perhaps, it is closer to the truth of the mental sterility of twenty-year olds to remark that the contributor has reversed his cause and effect. President Lowell not long ago remarked that, in his opinion, based on some seventy years of observation, young men were the conservatives and old men the radicals. There may yet be hope for the present generation.