Colleges Open

In colleges throughout the land last week janitors and charladies began once more to shuffle about their leisurely jobs. Pop-eyed new students and blase old ones busied themselves with multitudinous activities. College presidents delivered themselves of sapient dicta. College merchants once more did business. The Press delivered its annual salutes to learning.

With freshman enrollments everywhere increased over last year's, and upper-class enrollments slightly decreased (because men with two or three years of learning could better yield place), some college openings were noteworthy as follows:

Eight-year-old Duke University near Durham, N. C. announced the beginning of its "98th" year, proudly counting back not only to Trinity College from which it derived but also to little old York Academy. Squabbles and jealousies in Duke Medical School, which during the summer lost its able Dr. Harold Lindsay Amoss (of the Rockefeller Institute), had quieted down, but the school was still plagued by lawsuits brought by local citizens charging that their relatives were wrongfully operated upon or autopsied in Duke Hospital. Too, there was talk at Duke that the University income (mostly from Southern Power System) is declining or will decline, and that University officials who in better times built themselves costly homes now face a substantial salary slash.

Harvard University entered its 298th year with Dr. James Bryant Conant as new president. This year Harvardmen will save some $110,000 on room & board, the University having reduced rates. Last week Harvard announced that Poet-Scholar Laurence Binyon, deputy keeper of the British Museum, would succeed Poet Thomas Stearns Eliot in the famed Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry. One of the 1,000-odd freshmen registering at Harvard last week was Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. who arrived with a bodyguard. The freshmen were greeted by Charles Francis Adams. Harvard overseer who counseled: "To be a success you must be among the fittest, for they shall survive." And he quoted Harvard's late Dean Nathaniel Southgate Shaler who used to warn Theodore Roosevelt: "It is a good plan not to make more of a damn fool of yourself than God Almighty intended you should."

To his freshmen President Conant said: "May I suggest that your college career is an excellent time to cultivate a tolerant, skeptical spirit. No one need worry lest he have too few prejudices."

John Dyneley Prince, retiring U. S. Minister to Jugoslavia, returned to teach Slavonic languages at Columbia University. His position had been held open since 1921 when President Harding appointed him Minister to Denmark. This week Columbia's President Nicholas Murray Butler was to talk to his students about New York politics.

To Chicago went Andre de Laboulaye, French Ambassador to the U. S., to confer the cross of the Legion of Honor upon President Walter Dill Scott of Northwestern University, in recognition of his Wartime personnel work (for which he also received a Distinguished Service Medal). This year Northwestern and the University of Chicago are to "cooperate" by exchanging facilities, with the expressed hope of making Chicago "the greatest university centre in the U. S." Last week both were joined with seven other Chicago institutions in offering help to 3,600 one-time students of the city's Crane Junior College, closed for economy. They will permit the students to pay their tuition in instalments. Ostensibly in protest against school economies, 1,000 Chicago high school pupils went briefly on strike last week.

The University of Pennsylvania opened a new College of Liberal Arts for Women, enrollment 200. Stanford University lifted the limitation on female students which Mrs. Leland Stanford wrote into its charter in 1899. Fearing that women might some day outnumber men. she decreed that no more than 500 be enrolled. But Stanford has lately felt pinched. Hoping for bigger income, President Ray Lyman Wilbur pointed out another clause in the charter, stipulating a "university of high degree." He cunningly argued that the limitation clause made this impossible. Stanford's trustees agreed. Stanford's 3,000 males grumbled. With the passing of "the 500" there died the practice of calling a co-ed "1 300th."

Acting President Edward Ellery of Union College (Schenectady, N. Y.) summoned to the 138th annual opening exercises not only his students and faculty but also Union's trustees, janitors, stenographers, secretaries, groundsmen, dormitory matrons, charladies, cooks and dishwashers. He informed them that they were all "agencies for the accomplishment of Union's distinctive aim, the intellectual advancement of youth."

Yale University inaugurated its version of the House Plan--seven colleges in costly quadrangles given by Edward Stephen Harkness. Among Yale's new professors are famed Brain Surgeon Harvey Gushing and James Ramsay Allardyce Nicoll of London who succeeds George Pierce Baker in the Drama School. Yale reshuffled its graduate courses, distributing among its professional schools the degrees in Music, Public Health, Engineering, Drama and Architecture which were formerly offered by the Graduate School.

Of the many German scholars deprived of their jobs by the Nazis, the University of Pennsylvania got one, Carnegie Institute of Technology three, Manhattan's New School for Social Research ten. The last announced a "University in Exile," a Graduate School of Political & Social Sciences sponsored by private benefactors who gave $60,000. An independent school, it will use the New School's modernistic building, will set rigid entrance requirements instead of opening its doors to any paying student as does the New School.

Princeton University opened its 187th year with a new president, Dr. Harold Willis Dodds. English Professor Robert Kilburn Root is dean of the faculty succeeding Mathematician Luther Pfahler Eisenhart, now dean of the Graduate School. Princeton men noted three new buildings rising not far from their chapel. Anonymously donated, they will house the famed Westminister Choir School, founded seven years ago by Dr. John Finley Williamson and largely supported by Mrs. Harold Ellstner Talbott of Dayton, Ohio.

President James" Lukens McConaughy of Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.), expounded a "recovery code" for colleges to his students, with a six-day week and a minimum 40 hr. of work.

A new University of Kansas City was ready to open to 250 students.

For the first time, University of Nebraska publications were permitted to run tobacco advertisements, but not those in which women are shown smoking.

The Los Angeles branch of the University of California (7,000 students) for the first time introduced graduate work, limited however by lack of funds. The nearby University of Southern California opened a new School of Research, a branch of its Graduate School. Centred mainly in U. S. C.'s handsome new Edward Laurence Doheny Junior Memorial Library, it will offer 105 courses in all branches of knowledge. Last week about 100 Ph.D.-seekers enrolled, were characterized by Dean Rockwell Dennis Hunt as not only "masters in some known field of art or science but discoverers and creators as well."

In the midst of opening Rutgers University and its affiliate New Jersey College for Women, Dr. Robert Clarkson Clothier hurried off on a sorry errand. At Lake Placid, N. Y. had disappeared Mrs. Mabel Smith Douglass, 56, who retired as dean of New Jersey College for Women last spring because of ill health. She had apparently been rowing. Her capsized boat was found in shore. Grapplers and a diver hunted for the body. Dr. Clothier joined in the hunt, issued statements, then hurried back to Rutgers.

U. S. Commissioner of Education George Frederick Zook announced he was trying to get self-supporting college students (about half the total number in the U. S.) exempt from NRA restrictions.

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