Vale

This, our first editorial, is in four senses a farewell.

It is a farewell to the outgoing board. To them go our congratulations on a highly successful year, our respect for their opinions, well considered and well expressed, and our best wishes for their future as individuals. With a feeling of some astonishment and of some regret, akin to that of the graduating schoolboy who suddenly finds himself in a position to disobey his masters, we discover that we are shutting the door on their policies.

It is a farewell to the "Yale News" as an institution rather than a newspaper. We are tired of being stodgy, of being predictable, of being so oppressively respectable. Not only do we intend to make the "News" good reading, but we believe it can be made exciting reading, we believe there are new things to be found and reported. And as a newspaper the "News" bids final farewell to the delusion that it is meant solely to reflect undergraduate opinion. Here our predecessor has blazed the trail for us by pointing out the dullness and the futility of trying to enunciate what is representative in the welter of student thought. We go further in maintaining that if our opinions are worth expressing, they must lead, they must be in the forefront.

It is farewell to too great idealism on matters of education. Realism to us is more important. For proposals and measures that are premised on a university full of super-scholars we promise ridicule, while we shall support any move towards giving the average man a better education. Rigidity in scholastic requirements is in itself a form of idealism, and every possible increase in flexibility, every real recognition of the difference between the exceptional and the usual student will receive our unqualified approval. Finally, we hold it nonsensical to attack those institutions which have made Yale what it is, however uneducational some may claim them to be. Hence, the traditional blast at the Senior Societies will not appear. The Junior Fraternition can expect our support. By and large we approve extra-curricular activities.

And lastly, it is an emphatic farewell to political conservatism. During the past year the "News" has knelt at the shrine of the classical economy; although we shall leave it, particularly in our general support of the Roosevelt administration, we have nothing but respect for that position and its ilk. It is for the unthinking stick-in-the-muds that our censure is reserved. The "News" has long made every attempt to arouse student interest in public affairs. That battle is almost won. But interest is not enough-at least, not passive interest. We are determined to be an unmitigated nuisance in persecuting those that take ideas for granted, that inherit ideas, and have none of their own. In a swiftly changing world, where no principles, no matter how sacred, go unchallenged, where everything is wide awake and stirring, Yale can not be allowed to doze. Yale student thought must be in the very front rank and not half a century behind. --The Yale Daily News.