At Yale

While other U. S. colleges continued to seethe quietly last week, two ripples of measurable proportions passed over Yale University, indicating main currents of today's educational flux, sounding main chords of that universal chorus, What's Wrong with U. S. Educa-ation?

President James Rowland Angell's annual report was published. This voiced the current conviction of administrators that college is at once too easy and too narrow for the student. President Angell placed his blame back on the preparatory schools and the parents; declared that young men should be graduated from college at least two years younger (at 19); deplored "lockstep" systems and indicated intensity as the desirable concomitant to more liberal teaching methods. The general tenor of the report was, "Give them liberty, but give them work." Interesting specifications were: "Too long and possibly too many vacations. . . . Too many of the rewards of college life, of which both parents and students are avid, place a premium on physical and social maturity. ... Our tutorial systems, examinations and honor courses are frank adaptations of English university procedure. We can hardly allow patriotic sentiments to interfere with the effort to employ them."

The other undulation at Yale was part of undergraduatedom's persistent demand for liberty. In the light of President Angell's observations it might have been interpreted as rebellion against "lock-stepping," or as an example of the things college men have time to get excited about when supplied with easy work and long vacations, or as an expression of "social maturity." In any case the recrudescence of Yale's war on compulsory chapel was no new phenomenon.

The renewed dissension at Yale was stirred up, strange to say, by Harvard. There is, in Harvard's junior class, a onetime member of Yale's present senior class, one Lucius Beebe. After three years of moon-calfing about in New Haven, Student Beebe is in a position to tell Harvard men much about their Eli contemporaries. A bookish, loose-tongued fellow, with poetic ideas and no great respect for conventions, he is willing to make a public stir in the columns of the Crimson, Harvard's live undergraduate daily. Last autumn he supplied a comparison of Yale and Harvard rather flattering to the latter (TIME, Nov. 30). Last week he revisited his old haunts, found out the progress made by an undergraduate Yale committee that was meeting with the administration on the chapel question, and wrote the Crimson a detailed account, using names and phrases with a glib informality that made reading unusually racy for a college sheet.

This account the Crimson was swift to publish, together with an editorial, "Fools Rush In ... extending sympathy to protestant Yale, recalling Harvard's own victory over compulsory prayers in 1885. Beebe's article read so well and Harvard's fellow feeling waxed so strong, that the Crimson editors printed 1,000 extra copies of their issue for distribution in New Haven. There, Yale undergraduates and executives read: "The sole remaining relic of bigotry at Yale will finally be discarded. . . . An attack upon compulsory chapel at Yale in no way implies an attack upon an institution even remotely religious. . . . The faculty fears a rejection of its suggestions [to abandon compulsion] by the Corporation and consequent loss of dignity and prestige. . . . The only people who really desire the retention of chapel are those the least concerned with it; namely, the Corporation, of which at present four are ministers, and a fringe of hangers-on, uplifters, itinerant preachers, professional edifiers, right thinkers and reformers. These, while of little actual authority, can be relied upon to unite in a most prodigious chorus of bellyaching at the slightest sign of a let-up in the barrage of moral drivel which is constantly aimed at the Yale undergraduate. . . ."

Yale was faintly annoyed. President Angell referred to Beebe's visit as a 1926 Paul Revere's ride, and declared that "any contribution from Harvard would not in any way influence the committee."

The Rev. Samuel C. Bushnell, militant Yale alumnus, denounced Beebe in no uncertain tones. The Yale News disavowed Beebe's impropriety, saying "nothing is to be gained by waving red flags at an already excited bull." What irked as much as anything was Beebe's premature disclosure of a new Yale endowment drive for 20 millions.