Arma Virumque Cano

For most U.S. schoolboys, Greek and Latin are languages not only dead but buried. But New Hampshire's famed Phillips Exeter Academy still compels all its 730 boys to study one or the other for two years.

Last week the Exonian, the Academy's student paper, had the horrors over a belated discovery: the faculty had quietly abolished this classics requirement, beginning next fall. The paper splashed across Page One an "open letter to the trustees" signed by the Exonian's President John Cowles Jr., 17. (Among the trustees is his father, part owner of the Minneapolis Star-Journal, the Des Moines Register & Tribune, and Look.) Young Cowles obviously thought that the faculty's action was a concession to Exeter scholars from poor families.

Wrote Cowles: "We entirely agree that Exeter must stop catering to a single social and economic class. . . . But it is totally fallacious to reason that Exeter must teach a boy a mass of archeology or science merely because he comes from a coal-mining town. . . . This new curriculum [will] lower Exeter to the level of a vocational institution whose graduates are skilled in the business of doing, not the business of thinking."

Exeter's new principal, William Gurdon Saltonstall, was not deterred. The whole thing, he said solemnly, was a question on which "reasonable men and boys" might differ.

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