Yale into Eleven

There was much besides Hard Times and Old Times for Yale graduates to discuss when they assembled in New Haven for Alumni Day last week. Day before in the Waterbury, Conn. Republican had appeared a story to the effect that to Yale's alumni would be broken the news that Yale's famed Sheffield Scientific School was going to be abolished; also, that eating and sleeping privileges were to be taken from the fraternity houses.

No such announcements were made. But the Yale "House Plan'' which many think may play hob with traditional Yale institutions, was brought up once more (it was outlined for the first time on Alumni Day last year; TIME, March 3, 1930) and amplified in speeches by President James Rowland Angell and Professor Robert Dudley French.

Newest feature is the long-awaited division of Yale college into residential quadrangles. Numbering eleven, these will be known not as "houses" (as at Harvard; but as "colleges." They will be given names celebrated in Yale history. Five of them--Berkeley, Saybrook, Branford, Pierson, Davenport--have already been projected, three in existent buildings, two in lavish Gothic piles now abuilding. Each college will have a "master" and about ten assistant or associate "fellows." Last year the first master was appointed: popular young Professor French.

Next appointment was that of Henry Emerson Tuttle, curator of prints. Last week a third was announced: Dean of Men Alan C. Valentine of Swarthmore College, Swarthmore graduate (class of 1921), Oxford Rhodes Scholar, Rugby player and coach of the champion U.S. Olympic Rugby team at Paris in 1924.

With their quadrangles, masters, fellows and common halls, where students are expected to dine and converse urbanely, the Yale planners might seem to be aping the British manner. Yet the Yale (and Harvard) "House Plan" had its forerunner in U. S. colleges long ago. In 1897 a Princeton political economy professor named Woodrow Wilson began thinking about the advisability of re-organization of college life. Basic trouble at Princeton, he thought, was the clubs. President McCosh had suppressed the Greek-letter fraternities; but their successors, the upper-class eating clubs, were just as bad. ''The side shows are swallowing up the circus," was Wilson's famed remark. "There is danger that we will develop socially, as Harvard did and Yale is tending to do." In 1906 he had been president of Princeton for four years. At a meeting of a sympathetic Board of Trustees he proposed a quadrangle plan: to have the undergraduates live, almost self-governing, in small colleges presided over by a master and two or three resident preceptors. These colleges could, he thought, very well be evolved from clubs and clubhouses.

The Princeton trustees appointed a committee headed by President Wilson to investigate and elaborate the plan. But opposition arose: from Dean West of the Graduate School, who feared that development of the Wilson plan would distract interest from his own school; from ex-President Grover Cleveland, on the Graduate School trustee committee and friend of Dean West; from Dr. Henry van Dyke; from Professor John Grier Hibben, upon whose support Wilson had counted. Outside of Princeton, however, the plan was received with enthusiasm. Press, public, many an alumnus hailed it. Said Harvard's Charles Francis Adams (now U. S. Secretary of the Navy): "Your theory of 'quads' seems to me more nearly to meet existing college requirements than anything else which has been advanced."

Nineteen seven was a panic year, no time to push reforms. Woodrow Wilson was warned that other more vital projects would suffer if he persisted in this one. At a trustee meeting in October of that year every member but one voted to drop the plan. Though President Wilson fought, appealed to alumni, broke with Professor Hibben, the Quadrangle Plan was accorded no further consideration.

Yale's House Plan, like Harvard's, like President Wilson's, aims at what every one thinks a college should be: a place where professors and students can study together, enjoy a cultured academic life. Yale's new colleges, in conjunction with recent curricular changes will permit able students to do specialized work, free from cut-&-dried restrictions. They will pursue required college courses (the new divisions will make no change in these). After freshman year (which will have as heretofore its own dean and dormitories), the student will meet his new master and fellows. Theory is that contact with them will whet his appetite for learning, and under their guidance, if he wishes, he will do extra, intensive work. "What we are planning for the Yale of the future," said Professor French, "is not a system, but a life." Of the men who will be leaders in this life, he says: "We are not looking for the sort . . . who courts cheap popularity with his students, nor for the man who will conceive of his position either as that of Captain of the Boy Scouts or as that of a genial host at a protracted house party." He will wield a "civilizing influence." But ultimate authority will rest, as it has heretofore, in the Deans of the undergraduate schools.

Whereas Princeton's quadrangle plan might have grown out of its club system, Yale's begins independent of it. Said Professor French: ". . . The precise relations between the fraternities and the quadrangles must be worked out . . . with the aid and counsel of the men who are at once members of the fraternities and students in the quadrangles. And until the plan is in operation, there will be no such animal. In the meantime . . . any student organization that has real vitality in it need have no fear that what we are planning will place it in jeopardy of its life."

Yale fraternity leaders, two days after Alumni Day, signed a pledge rigorously to abstain from "packing"--i. e. signing up their prospective members before the annual official calling week--a perennial campus scandal. The Yale Daily News pointed out that the fraternities did well to sign a pledge: one false step might "consign them to unenviable and irreconcilable doom."

"Recognition"

"Freddy Ehrensberger, former North High School athlete, has been offered a scholarship at Princeton University, Princeton, N. J., in recognition of his athletic ability. ..." Thus last week read a boxed sport-page notice in The Ohio State Journal, Columbus, Ohio.

Handsome, amiable Freddy Ehrens-berger is six feet tall, weighs 175 Ib. Though no scholastic leader, his book value at North High School is good; he expects to be graduated in June. He played halfback on the football team, was chosen for a local all-scholastic eleven. Questioned, he said he had not yet decided whether to accept the scholarship offered him.

Wired Princeton: WE HAVE NEVER HEARD OF FREDDY EHRENS-BERGER NOR ARE THERE ANY RECORDS HERE INDICATING THAT HE HAS EVER APPLIED OR IS BEING CONSIDERED FOR ADMISSION TO PRINCETON.

N.E.A. Week

One of the world's largest annual professional gatherings--15,000 public school superintendents and teachers, members and associates of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association--assembled last week in De- troit. With them they had ten gold-lettered, morocco-bound volumes containing more than 4,500 tribute-letters to Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, written by enthusiastic U. S. school children. Though no prize had been offered, the idea, suggested by the N. E. A., inspired some 40.000 youngsters to send in essays, drawings, illuminated scrolls, a model of the Admiral's City of New York carved in laundry soap. A 6th-grader wrote: "I am happy to have the opportunity to write to the man who explored the South Pole. I have seen the pictures of your adventures in the cold blizzards. ... In those pictures of your expeditions, I liked best where you dressed Igloo your dog, in that sweater and shoes. Next I liked where you dropped the flag at the South Pole. I really think it all was wonderful."

The educators met daily, talked shop. They elected Edwin Cornelius Broome, superintendent of Philadelphia schools, to be president of the department for the next year, succeeding President Robert Norman Crozier of Dallas, Tex., who becomes first vice president. (The National Education Association proper convenes every July, elects its own president.)

Hero of the sessions was Admiral Byrd, to whom an evening (mottoed "Character in Action") was devoted.

President Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor of the National Geographic Society: "No explorer ever before has received such a national tribute from school children as you have enabled our young people to present to Admiral Byrd. . . . His name will ever live as the greatest pioneer navigator of the air, as does that of Magellan as the greatest pioneer navigator of the farthermost seas."

Admiral Byrd: "I am deeply grateful for ... your appreciation of the brave and loyal work of my entire command . . . your realization, as educators, of the high value of exploring and investigating scientifically the vast, mysterious wastes of the Antarctic Continent. . . . Our expedition . . . from first to last, has been planned and executed so that we might try to add our share to the body of knowledge of the world in which we live."

Other features included an oldtime ball with Virginia reels, schottisches, polkas by Henry Ford's orchestra; an educational exhibit (radios, phonographs, talking pictures, temperance demonstrations for classrooms), and many a speech.

Bacon, Eggs, Sonnet. Said Dr. Lynn Harold Hough, dean of Drew Theological Seminary, Madison, N. J.: "There must be appreciation of Archimedes and Einstein, as well as understanding of their theories, if youth is to know the values of life which cannot be measured by instruments of precision. ... A poet has bacon and eggs and coffee for breakfast and by noon turns out a sonnet. In such a process something has happened which simple chemistry does not satisfactorily explain."

Drought & Depression, Willis Anderson Sutton, president of the Association, superintendent of schools in Atlanta, Ga. said: "Education in the Southeastern States is face to face with an almost desperate situation. Hit by Drought and Depression, hardly knowing where the next dollar is coming from, it is hard put to it not to make a cut in school expenditures.* Thus far not a single State has done so. ... The level of culture ... is the barometer of business. Cultural agencies of all sorts at a time like this must be maintained. . . ."

Salary Cry-Leaders among the educators joined in an open letter to U. S. parents, warning them against "the tragic wastefulness of poor schools or no schools at all." Said they: "We regret and condemn shortsighted proposals now current in certain communities, to cripple needlessly the effectiveness of the schools by undiscriminating and drastic reductions in the salary schedules of teachers. ... To cripple the schools, even for a year or so, means an irreparable loss in national health, stability, culture, leadership and citizenship."

Parenthood. William McAndrew, editor of The Educational Review, said he thought that bad marriages and faulty family training could be remedied by definite training for parenthood. "The schools are beginning to teach prospective brides and grooms, married men and women, mothers and fathers an intelligent and effective wedded life, conduct of a home and training of citizens."

Alcohol. As they have done annually for a decade, the educators passed a resolution upholding the 15th Amendment, condemning "false advertising" of cigarets, narcotics, pornography. A dissenter to the Dry resolution was Daniel S. Kealey, superintendent of Hoboken's schools. Said he: "Let me warn you to consider the question well, lest you join the fanatics whose position has been stated in the crimson eloquence produced by machine gun bullets." Shouted the teachers: "Take him away! Throw him out!"

Said Football Coach Robert C. Zuppke of the University of Illinois (in a speech defending intercollegiate athletics): "I wonder why you people are so positive about this liquor question, when you don't know much about it. A wall is built around you educators. People hide liquor from you."

A fact in support of Coach Zuppke: Greatest Pioneer Byrd is no teetotaler.

*A State which, though it hopes to reduce taxes, still aims at educational progress, is North Carolina. Last fortnight its general assembly was planning a six-months state-supported school program, to be paid for out of "sources other than ad valorem tax on property." State-schools would remove a burden from property-owners, would help further the "Live-at-Home" movement sponsored by North Carolina's able Governor Oliver Max Gardner--an economic movement to make petty husbandmen self-sufficient, independent.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.