Crimson Kills H-Y-P Confab As Student Interest Decreases

Lack of support among undergraduates has forced the cancellation of the Harvard-Yale-Princeton Conference of Public Affairs scheduled for Cambridge this spring, it was announced last night.

This year's conference was to have been the fifth round table discussion to be held since the conference was founded by the newspapers of the three universities in 1936. The first conference was held is Princeton, and the meeting place has rotated since then.

The CRIMSON Board voted against holding the conference this year because it "would be almost impossible to stage a conference which will fulfill the original purpose of holding them; namely to stimulate interest in public affairs through informal discussions among students, professors, and public officials.

"The first two conferences in 1936 and 1937 were fairly successful, but even then the originators of the conference felt that vast improvement could be made in future years ... In view of the complete apathy towards the conference among Harvard undergraduates both on and outside of the CRIMSON, we do not feel that a conference here could be successful."

The original plan behind the H-Y-P Conference was to gather together interested undergraduates and public officials to discuss problems of contemporary politics. Prominent officials were invited to speak at dinners and informal round table discussions were held at which specific topics were aired.

Financial Burden

The main difficulty has been to raise approximately $2,000 every year in order to hold the conference. During the first few years the interest in the gathering seemed to warrant the expense and labor connected with holding the conference; interest, however, has dropped off during the last three years. Another disadvantage of the conferences was that despite the fact that a great many people wished to attend the first two conferences only a few could be accepted as a large number would have made the discussion impractical. On the other hand the nature of the conference made it necessary to keep the proceedings "off the record" in order to alow the public official to speak freely and only a few benefitted from what they had to say.