Boys Will Be Boys

Was it just the old-fashioned college spirit, with G.I. high jinks thrown in? Whatever it was, the nation's college campuses, orderly and disciplined during the war, were popping with mischief that sometimes bordered on vandalism. The Ivy League seemed to harbor the worst offenders:

P:In reprisal for a Princeton raid on the Yale Bowl, 25 Yalemen seized Princeton's radio station, overpowered its staff and broadcast Bulldog propaganda. Then they daubed Yale blue on a bronze tiger in Palmer Square, painted up a Princeton dormitory and clock, burned a "Y" into the Nassau Tavern lawn, and chopped down the Palmer Stadium goal posts. The Yale dean called it "vendetta spirit which surpasses the realm of good fun."

P:At the University of Pennsylvania the next night, before the Penn-Army game, 3,000 men & women staged the most destructive "Rowbottom"* in the University's history. For four hours, demonstrators cut trolley wires and set kerosene fires on the streetcar tracks, overturned autos and punctured tires, kept 300 cops busy untangling traffic and quelling the mob. Pennsylvania's President George McClelland suspended three riot leaders, said sternly: "With thousands of veterans crying for a chance at a college education, there is no room on the nation's campuses for the current epidemic of disorders."

*Penn cry for a riot, similar to Harvard's "Rinehart" (TIME, April 8). The legend goes that in 1910 tippling cronies of one Joe Rowbottom disturbed the campus night so persistently by shouting his name that indignant students threw wash bowls and pitchers out the windows at them.

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