Seven Units Opened This Fall Without Flourishes Accompanying House Plan

When President Lowell accepted fifteen millions of Harkness dollars to build the Houses, he stole the thunder which rightfully belonged to Yale. Thanks to Harvard's promptness and Yale's hesitancy, the College Plan at Yale went into effect this fall with none of the din and fury which accompanied the start of the House Plan at Harvard.

In some ways Yale gained by waiting. Of the projected ten or possibly eleven Colleges, seven went into operation at once: Branford, Calhoun, Davenport, Johnathan Edwards, Pierson, Saybrook, and Trumbull. Another is going up on the site of Berkeley Oval, and two more will be carved out of the present buildings of the Sheffield Scientific School. With the twenty millions which Edward Stephen Harkness lavished on his Alma Mater, Yale has been able to build five out of the present seven units new, the other two being made out of the Harkness Quadrangle.

No Tutors In Colleges

In keeping with the prevailing style of architecture at Yale, all the Colleges are Gothic with the exception of Pierson and Davenport, which are American Georgian like the Harvard House. The rich and heavy Gothic makes the Colleges seem more cloistered, while the narrow windows make most of the rooms rather dark. The Colleges are uniformly smaller than the Houses, accommodating from 175 to 200 residents apiece.

The main point of difference between the Colleges and the Houses is that at Yale there are no tutors. To President Lowell, the House Plan represented the ideal setting for the working out of the tutorial system and the logical consequence of the system. The College Plan has preceded the tutors, however, in New Haven. The Colleges are not with out resident members of the faculty since a Master and about ten "fellows" reside in each unit. The fellows resemble tutors much more than they do the "associates" of the Harvard Houses, since they live in the Colleges and meet the students in their capacity of instructors or professors.

Yale Rents Lower

The scale of rents at Yale runs slightly under that at Harvard, thanks to a special fund which was saved out of the cost of building the Colleges. The minimum rental is $110, ten dollars more that that at Harvard, but the maximum is only $400 per man, nearly two hundred below that at Harvard. For food, the College resident pays $8 for twenty-one meals, fifty cents less than in the Houses. Yale has copied Harvard in fixing the prices for fourteen or seven meals per week at a much higher proportional rate. Another plan devised at Cambridge and copied at New Haven is the special emergency employment plan whereby jobs are created for residents of the Houses or Colleges as the case may be.

Athletics on College Basis

As happened at Harvard, the College has superseded the class as an athletic unit. College athletics are organized much as at Cambridge, with inter-College leagues and outside games. The first contest between a champion Yale College team and a champion Yale College team and a champion Harvard House team was the Saybrook College-Winthrop House game last Saturday, ending in a scoreless tie. At Yale, College residents on probation are allowed to represent their Colleges, even in the championship contests against the Harvard Houses. This provision has resulted in a strange comedy of errors this fall, with Harvard coyly dickering with Yale to repeal a rule which didn't exist in New Haven.