Harkness & Light

Ten years ago the young men of Yale wandered through the splendors of Harkness Memorial Quadrangle and marveled. They drew inspiration from other works of Architect James Gamble Rogers, praised with President James Rowland Angell the "splendid uprush" of collegiate Gothic. There were few iconoclasts to denounce the theatrical charm of Wrexham Court and its tower ("copy of Wrexham Tower, England, built 1506"), or the artificially-cracked window panes and impressive, scholarly gloom of Harkness chambers which resulted from the building being designed principally from the outside. Originally intended to give U. S. education a hoary, spiritual aspect, neo-Gothic has only lately been used by radically-minded undergraduates as an issue through which an entire cultural system can be criticized. Last week, in the second issue of a new insurgent undergraduate magazine, The Harkness Hoot, some of Yale's youngsters played hob with copyist architecture, drew a distinction between Harkness & Light. Offered as "Yale's Only Attempt at a Living Art" was a photograph of some scaffolding which was used to remove books from the old library to the new.

The article was called "Art v. Yale University," written by William Harlan Hale '31 who, with Selden Rodman '31, bolted from the Yale Literary Magazine, charging that periodical with "staleness, preciosity, clique-atmosphere." Excerpts:

"A well-known modern Swedish architect, visiting Yale a while ago, was shown the [Sterling] Library while it was still unfinished and the 16-story Book Tower stood only as a structure of steel girders and braces in geometric patterns. 'Ah!' said the architect, looking up in surprise and relief, 'at last you are doing something really modern at Yale. ... Of course you will do no more than cover the steel tower with glass?' . . . How utterly must he have been disgusted to see stone vaults, instead of supporting the roof, being supported by the roof! Or to see buttresses, instead of holding up a wall, actually being held up by steel! All this in the university whose motto is Lux et Veritas. There is not one suggestion of Veritas in the Sterling Library; and for that matter there is precious little Lux. . . ."

From the standpoint of journalistic timeliness, the editors of The Harkness Hoot had the good fortune to defend elsewhere in their current issue the gubernatorial candidacy of Dr. Wilbur Lucius Cross, Dean Emeritus of the Yale Graduate School, now Governor-elect of Connecticut. And the announcement of a forthcoming appreciation of Author Sinclair Lewis, Yale 1907, coincided happily with last week's news that Author Lewis had won the Nobel Prize (see p. 19).

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