Point, Counter-point

About this time each year the Student Council and the Administration participate in a little University Hall ritual. The script hardly ever changes: the Council asks for a liberalization of parietal rules and the Administration refuses to grant it. Last year, however, the Council adlibbed. Tacked on the usual list of arguments was a line about Yale moving back its Saturday night curfew to eleven o'clock.

As before, when the Council argued that the present rules forced undergraduates into local bars, the Administration answered that it must set regulations insuring the highest moral conduct. But the Yale example called for a new counter. Yale changed its rules "only very recently," wrote Dean Bender for the Administration, "and on an experimental basis."

A year has passed and Yale does not regret its rules change. If this were not enough to convince the Administration that it can trust the discretion of University students, it might observe the graduate dormitories, whose occupants enjoy even later hours than do the Yale students.

Like the Council, the Administration has always recognized the need for places to take dates after curfew. Its refusals to change that curfew have seemed a resistance to change more than anything else. Now that Yale has successfully tried the experiment for them, it is time for the Administration to re-examine its script and make the changes the Council requested last year.