THE NEW YORKERS

Yesterday strikes were called at New York University and the College of the City of New York by the students. At N.Y.U. the cause given was the forced suspension of the campus paper, the Daily News, by the Student Sonata; while at City College the undergraduates were fighting for the ro-instatement of nineteen students who had participated in a mock trial of some of the college officials. In both instauces the demonstrators had resented the invasion of their rights of free speech and press. This is by no means the first time that disturbances of this short have broken out at these colleges. Their frequency and seriousness is in large part due to the crude and clumay and tactics employed to settle the disputes by those in authority.

It is difficult to get all the facts underlying the drastic action taken by the faculty in one case and the student council in the other. But it seems plain enough that the subsequent situations were both handled with complete lack of tack, and in a way calculated to promote friction. When five hundred students of City College attempted to present a petition to their president, they were refused admittance. No effort was or has been made to settle the matter in a sensible manner with some regard for the feeling of the undergraduates. To deny them the privillege of petition was hardly the way to win them over to the side of the Administration. Nor was the affair at N.Y.U. dealt with in a much more intelligent fashion. The Student Senate, apparently determined at last to assert itself on a controversial question where the Daily had taken the wrong side, discontinued the publication of the paper. This sort of dictation was of course intolerable as the strike and mass meetings indicated.

The demonstrations in these cases were motivated by something more than an adolescent desire to make a noise; the students felt that they had been summarily and stupidly dealt with, and that efforts to clamp down on the free expression of undergraduate opinion deserved a plain and speedy answer. Such incldents as these, and the ill-feeling and organized protest stirred up, show not nearly the touchiness and independence of the student body, but more particularly the need of a saner policy on the part of the college and student councils in place of the present stubborn and antagonistic attitude.