Princeton Students Reopen Fight Against Compulsory Chapel Rules

Students at Princeton will continue this fall their drive to end the required chapel rule under which freshmen and sophomores must go to church on Sunday.

The picture above shows how some Tiger undergraduates react today to a requirement that ended in Cambridge over 60 years ago. Since 1886, Harvard College has had voluntary attendance at both Sunday and daily services. At Princeton, students have been working for years to decrease the requirement to its present amount.

When this photograph ran in the Daily Princetonian, the headline over it read "Balcony Scene from Dean Aldrich's Production of 'Required Religion'." The Princeton paper calls this the "usual Sunday scene."

The undergraduate at the lower left has hidden his morning paper under his coat at the approach of the photographer. In the next aisle one can see the legs of a sleeping Tiger. The black arrow at the top points out the newspaper read by another student, while the man at the right is deeply engrossed in a pulp magazine or comic book.

A poll last spring showed that three-fourths of the Princeton student body was opposed to the compulsory attendance. There does continue to be some support for the program. Students saw the abolition of the present policy as "eliminating a Christian influence from the lives of those who need it most."