Follow the Leader

While the President of Yale has been accepting felicitations at the conclusion of ten years in office, and the President of Harvard has been taking part in various educational conferences, the President of Princeton has been kept busy by troubles at home.

The college had hardly opened for the year when it was discovered that $1600 worth of goods had been stolen on campus during the summer vacation. Lamented the princetonian, "Some 'Princeton gentlemen' consider themselves too special to be bound by such 'petty' distinctions as that between 'his' and 'mine'." At the same time, five top-floor rooms in a new dormitory (styled very much like the Leverett Towers) were refused occupancy permits because of inadequate fire exits. On the other hand, it appeared that the building was slowly sinking into the ground, so that the question of fire exits might become an academic one.

More than 70 per cent of Princeton students voted for Nixon and Lodge in a Princetonian poll, causing one anguished alumnus to visualize Princeton as a bastion of reaction in a world where "the radicalism of undergraduates is taken for granted." Meanwhile, an increasingly less subtle trend drew growls of distress from at least one senior, who wrote that "By constantly looking over her shoulder at Harvard and Yale, Princeton not only admits that she is a follower, but divests herself of the last vestiges of uniqueness." And indeed, a Harvard student suddenly shifted to Princeton would find himself very much at home.

Despite angry protests from students (whose defiance, however, was largely verbal), the faculty stuck to its ban on smoking in lecture halls and classrooms. President Goheen noted that the new restrictions matched those at Harvard and Yale, but quickly explained that they were put in effect only to save money on refinishing the tobacco-stained floors of classrooms and lecture halls.

Earlier, Princeton had opened a new "social quadrangle," suspiciously like a Harvard House (though the term was studiously avoided)--a group of dormitories, a central dining hall (in place of the traditional eating clubs), a library, and social facilities. Academically, the faculty approved a two-week reading period at the end of each term for independent thinking, reading, and writing-something Harvard has had for more than a decade. Moreover, contrary to the students' Republicanism, 72 per cent of the faculty voted pro-Kennedy, following, perhaps, the example of the very liberal Harvard faculty.

In the midst of these pro-Harvard and anti-Princeton hapepnings, a full-sized, scuffed orangutan was reported stolen from a college room. But perhaps he was not stolen; perhaps he only felt that a full-sized, stuffed orangutan had no place in the changing scheme of things.