Thesis & Theseus

Ugly rumors seeped through Vassar College last week. There had been cheating! In Hygiene 10a, a required Freshman course, gullery had been so bald, so universal that the Vassar Miscellany News circulated a questionnaire, published exceedingly damning replies.

The young ladies of Vassar are frequently irritated by the vast number of surveys, reports, theses which they are asked to write from time to time. Hygiene 10a requires a survey of sanitary conditions in the college. Of the 171 freshmen who replied to the questionnaire, 155 said they had copied each other's notes or papers or adopted surveys which were used by last year's class. Some of the collaboration, however, was done legally. Most freshmen felt that there had not been time enough to complete a thoroughgoing picture of Vassar's water supply, sewage disposal, sanitation in kitchens, etc. etc. Some said that even with the help they had the paper took twelve hours to compile. One freshman turned in a survey which had been marked "A" for the last two years. Two paid $1.50 for one which was graded 86% last year. Some papers still in use are "yellow with age."

The cheating girls said they had entered upon no conspiracy. College officials did not discover the alarming situation until several freshmen innocently told them of it. Then Dean C. Mildred Thompson called a meeting of the class, uttered a mild reprimand: the class, said she, should have made individual or united protest against what they thought a stiff assignment. A second questionnaire was handed out. All freshmen who admitted using another student's work in the whole or greater part of the survey would be obliged to take an extra examination.

Vassar's amiable President Henry Noble MacCracken contented himself with saying that no further action would be taken, that "the matter has been satisfactorily cleared up by publicity." President MacCracken had other things to do just then. A life mask had been taken of his face, from which was modelled a bulbous, theatrical mask. He was busy learning and polishing up Greek lines for the Hippolytus of Euripides. An able actor, Dr. MacCracken has appeared before in Vassar plays, has many times amused his students with burlesque speeches on Founder's Day. Last week he donned his mask and buskins and played Theseus, father of Hippolytus who spurns the love of his stepmother. Phaedra. An actress (Phaedra's nurse) who had played before with Dr. MacCracken was Professor Margaret Floy Washburn, famed psychologist, one of the few female members of the National Academy of Sciences (TIME, May 11). Hippolytus was given in the original Greek, with full chorus and a new musical score, in Vassar's Experimental Theatre. The Greek department assisted; students who took part will be given degree credits. Dr. MacCracken, English scholar and professor, pointed out that many early English plays were written and performed in English schools. Said he: "We are but following the English custom in this, for it was an Eton headmaster, Nicholas Udal, who wrote the first English comedy extant, Roister Doister, four centuries ago."

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