Harkness Heckled

In addition to some $100,000,000 worth of monumental benefactions, Edward Stephen Harkness will have two whole issues of Harvard's and Yale's comic magazines to carry his name down to posterity. Upon the announcement last year that he had given $13,000,000 to Harvard for an inner-college House Plan, the Lampoon bitterly denounced Donor Harkness as a destroyer of Old Harvard (TIME, Feb. 18, 1929). He was represented as trying to introduce anglophilic educational methods in a place where U. S. collegiate traditions have flourished for nearly 300 years.

Last week--twelve months later, almost to a day--the Yale Record published its "House-Planners' Number." Less bitter, less funny than Harvard's lampoonings, Record artists and scriveners had taken up stumbling brush and unsure pen to abuse Edward Harkness again. He had given Yale more than $10,000,000 for a House Plan similar to that of Harvard (TIME, Jan. 20). Still unaware of the Plan's detail, Yalemen only knew that last autumn's excavations on New Haven's Elm Street were for a group of buildings vaguely designated as "Unit A."

When President James Rowland Angell addresses visitors on Alumni Day (Feb. 22), Yalemen will know the exact extent to which the House Plan may supplant the sacred rites and traditions of Old Yale.

Dolefully said the Record: "We suggest that the News [undergraduate daily] interview the foreman in charge of Unit A to get some enlightening and authentic information on the House Plan. . . . The purpose of the House Plan being to make people chummy, we suggest that the new quadrangles be furnished with everything in pairs: wash basins facing each other, adjoining showers, twin beds, and the like. Under the new regime, the roommates best fitted for a Yale House will be a pair of Siamese Twins."

Enthusiastic if undistinguished drawings caricatured Donor Harkness on the back stoop eagerly picking up the News and the morning milk to see how his program was being received; shadowy, demoniac, pedagogs were pictured pouring down a horrid sworl of dicta and mandates upon a helpless undergraduate; the Corporation (board of Trustees) was seen servilely waiting upon the Harkness pleasure.

Poetically the Record railed:

"True, by cutting down on courses you can still more buildings add, But will ancient English bedrooms make Joe Yale a brighter lad?"

If the House Plan follows the Harvard system, it is not only calculated to make Joe Yale a brighter, but a more social lad. Although many an alumnus is loath to admit it, the organization of Yale today is strikingly dissimilar to that of Old Yale. A strong basis of Yale college life has been the class. When classes were counted in scores, the spirit of comradeship and the spirit of college tradition went hand in hand. Classmates, knowing each other by name and nickname, gayly did battle against other classes, drank beer at Mory's together, crowded the Fence on warm nights.

But, although entrance requirements have been stiffened, Yale's classes--and those of most other U. S. universities--have swelled into cumbersome hundreds. Class spirit has proportionally dwindled. It has become increasingly difficult for the faculty to pay individual attention to each student. Remembering fondly the social and educational intimacy of the small unit of students, many Yale pedagogs have been attracted to the British collegiate system. As at Harvard, it is supposed that at Yale an Americanization of the British resident college will be attempted. Probably united groups of undergraduates will live together in Gothic quadrangles, each group eating in its own refectory, lounging in its own living rooms. Good results to be hoped for: less time dissipated upon competitive extracurricular activities; resident faculty members at hand to prune and shape the growing intelligences of each inmate; House Spirit supplanting Class Spirit.

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