Erratic Dean's Office Confuses Foes

stones to secret societies, Taft, Hotch-kiss, Exeter, and Andover all form powerful eliques on the Yale campus which persist there long after freshman year.

The fraternities themselves serve to emphasize the split between the white shoe--"shoe" for short--and the black shoe elements. The houses are open to non-members just enough to let them grow envious over the facilities and opportunities enjoyed by the fortunate 25 percent. It is not surprising that a Yale Banner poll found that one-third of those not in fraternities would like to join if they had the background or the money.

Uphill Fight

Fraternity values as well as secret society values are strong at Yale; if an object is "shoe" it is desirable, if it is "black shoe" or "non-shoe" it is to be shunned. Even more than the Houses, the Yale Colleges mirror prevailing undergraduate prejudices; Calhoun, the "shoeiest" one, is flooded with applicants, while Jonathan Edwards, Trumbull, and Saybrook are ignored by freshmen. An organization with a black shoe reputation has an uphill fight to stay alive.

The Yale administration views all this striving and social differentiation with an amused tolerance, though twinges of doubt sometimes intrude upon even the most complacent minds. Alert, young President A. Whitney Griswold, himself a big wheel activities man as an undergraduate, confessed to the CRIMSON several years ago that "Down here we need to start doing things for their own sake, not for what they will lead to." His assistant Reuben A. Holden says "The whole accent down here is group activities while at Harvard a man is left pretty much to himself, whether he wants it or not." Professor Weiss puts it most succinctly: "Harvard is centrifugal, whirling people apart, Yale centripetal, drawing them together in a mass. You run the risk of personal maladjustment of those incapable of standing alone; we risk becoing a community of conformists."

The Yale student is in no danger of being left alone, so far as the University administration is concerned. The Dean's Office, while it does not meddle in all extra-curricular activities, takes a much closer interest in all Yale men than does its carbon copy in Cambridge. Strong pressure from the Dean's Office forced the abandonment of the traditional Derby Day outing two years ago when the annual spring-time bacchanal gave promise of becoming an annual spring-time orgy. Dean of the College William C. DeVane has recently chided his charges for sloppiness in class and cheating, while Dean of Students Whiteman has urged that fraternity drinking be toned down.

The paternalism of the Yale Dean's Office reached its high point last year when the old system of unlimited cuts was thrown out and a new rule limiting non Dean's List students to five cuts per term a course installed. Today student monitors police the aisles in Yale's small (50-man--or less) lecture rooms, dutifully noting down those absent. Editors of the News hark back to the Good Old Days when Big Brother was not watching you, and Yale was a college for self-reliant men. Nevertheless, DeVane's office is not old-fogey; parietal rules at Yale allow women in the rooms until 11 p.m.

Close Resemblance

Yet with all the stress on success, the split between white and black shoe, and the over-solicitous Dean's Office, Yale more closely resembles Harvard than it differs from it. The two institutions are as near twins as anything in the educational world; at both universities pleas for change are invariably bolstered by the telling argument, "They've been doing it this way for years up in Cambridge" or "down in New Haven," depending on where one is.

Ultimately the Harvard and Yale man are brothers under the skin. Nothing about the relationship between the two schools is so typical as the experience of a CRIMSON editor who wandered into the Trumbull College television room one night in search of local color, and became involved in a vigorous argument about football with a bona fide Yale man. At last becoming suspicious, the Yale asked "Where are you from anyway?" "Harvard" confessed the investigator. "My God," said the Trumbull man, "All the time I thought I was talking to the guy who sits next to me in Poly Sci. 10."