At New Haven

President Angell (Yale) entertained Presidents Hibben (Princeton) and Lowell (Harvard). Dean Cross (Yale Graduate School) entertained Deans Daniels (Illinois) and Lloyd (Michigan). President Hadley (Washington University) stayed at the home of Professor Corbin (Yale). Dean Jones (Yale College) was host to President Kinley (Illinois), while President Atwood (Clark) was received by Medical Dean Winternitz (Yale). Many another eminent educator and his wife were under other Yale roofs, so that it was an enjoyable social event as well as a professional affair, the annual meeting of the Association of American Universities, last week at New Haven.

Dean Seashore of Iowa addressed the first session on the undesirability of premature assistant instructorship appointments. When the graduate student is appointed while pursuing his graduate studies, "he loses the attitude of a student toward his superiors and tries to get special privileges as a member of the staff."

Dean Laing of Chicago deprecated interlocking graduate and undergraduate courses.

Professor Richardson of Dartmouth, author of the famed A Study of the Liberal College (TIME, May 4), proposed that "a crisis confronts the American college. . . whose true significance is not always understood. The college is suffering from the results of its own success." He spoke of the schools now growing up around liberal arts nuclei at universities as definitely vocational in character and effective in operation. By comparison, the liberal arts nuclei are of low intellectual tone, their students concealing beneath an assumed pride in a jovial, carefree life, the black despair of an inferiority complex.

Dean Cross of Yale Graduate School (also Editor of the Yale Review) reminded every one that the original purpose of the graduate school is to equip teachers for the college; he said: "The tendency has been to take over into the graduate school the methods of the undergraduate school. . . . We should revert."

President Keppel of the Carnegie Foundation took occasion to rap the regents of the University of Wisconsin for turning down an offer of a $600,000 endowed medical school from the Rockefeller Foundation (TIME, Aug. 17, Oct. 26). The regents' reason was fear of domination by the donor, and their resolution included all incorporated foundations. Said President Keppel: "It is hard to conceive that a fair-minded man or woman should fail to realize that the broadly co-operative character of these operations offers the most effective safeguard, if safeguard were needed, against any employment of these trust funds based upon unworthy motives."

Whether a college has any business restraining one of its professors from expressing his written views on various subjects, when these views are contrary to the policy of the college, was something the association could not decide. It voted that this question of professorial freedom was one that each institution must determine individually.

The association decided, because so many Orientals are coming to U. S. universities, to investigate the status of universities in the Orient.

Every year institutions are elected officers, this year as follows: President, Washington University; Vice President, University of California; Secretary, University of Michigan; new members of the executive committee, Ohio State and Virginia. The association voted to hold its next meeting at Northwestern University in a year.

Richest

The "youngest" university in the U. S. is the richest.

By the will of the late James B. Duke, North Carolina tobacco and power magnate, filed last fortnight, the $40,000,000 endowment for which Trinity College (Durham, N. C.) became a part of Duke University (TIME, Jan. 12) was doubled. Thirty additional millions were immediately available. Pending the transfer of Duke University's final 10 millions, leading endowments are:

Duke $70,000,000

Harvard 64,413,891*

Columbia 56,407,421

Yale 39,697,257

Chicago 31,992,620

Leland Stanford Jr 27,279,571

Johns Hopkins 19,741,717

M. I. T 17,122,000

Rochester 14,924,000

Princeton 14,000,000

Pennsylvania 10,208,000

Expense

"How much can I get through the year on?" ask college students. Last week the University of Denver published statistics: for a male, $600 a year; for a female $800.

Fatal Marks

In Berlin, according to despatches, Germany's increase in juvenile suicide was traced to scholastic failures. Last year the suicide rate among persons 16 and under was ten to a million, thrice the rate of France, practically ten times that of the U. S. Most of the suicides were boys who had received bad marks and felt, in addition to their shame, fear of parental anger and chastisement, their careers having been mapped out for them from birth, and their flunks connoting life failure.

Rector Nansen

St. Andrews University, oldest in Scotland (1411), conducted its annual election of a Lord Rector with the usual horseplay. As at Glasgow the week before (TIME, Nov. 2), eggs flew and smelled, herrings smelled and flew, tomatoes smelled and smelled and smashed, and cold water cascaded from the galleries of the Student Union. Arctic Explorer Dr. Fridtiof Nansen of Norway was elected with 216 votes against 160 for Novelist John Galsworthy.

Crystallizers

Almost every year some energetic undergraduate or group of undergraduates in some college conceives the idea that the collegiate opinion of the U. S. needs "crystallizing" on some issue or other. There is a firm precedent for nationwide undergraduate straw ballots on the League of Nations, presidential candidates, Prohibition, disarmament, the lecture system, chapel attendance, etc. Usually the organizer and his fellows are connected with an undergraduate newspaper which they wish to make famous for its feats in their year, or they are bent upon making a name for themselves, or they are inspired by a faculty idealist, or they are simply overflowing with exuberance and vitality which their curricular, athletic and cheerleading labors fail completely to absorb.

It is not uncommon for these crystallizers of collegiate opinion to rent an office in some central metropolis and devote, in addition to hours between classes, part or all of a vacation to their project. The resultant vote or opinion or resolution is always communicated to the President of the U. S. and to Congress; the newspapers gladly publish and editorialize upon the news--"Colleges decide. . . .colleges favor. . .colleges unanimously (or overwhelmingly or otherwise) condemn" this, that or the other thing. No one has ever computed the degree to which the result affects the march of human events, nor is this degree of any importance. Indisputable benefits of the custom are: The organizers experience almost all the motions and emotions of men actually determining live issues; the voters or conferees feel they have helped determine those issues and are thus the more conscious politically; the non-collegiate public is gratified to think that the privileged college element is concerned over issues of the day, thus insuring the issues a continued and more definite existence for a while at least.

Last week a Princeton Committee for a nationwide Collegiate Conference on the World Court dined in Manhattan with representatives of 15 other colleges. Electing Lewis Fox (Princeton) as chairman and Edna Trull (Barnard) as secretary, the diners named three December days for a grand convention in Princeton of representatives, men and women alike, from every institution of higher learning in the land. They stated their purpose: "The crystallization of the student opinion of the entire country on the World Court ... a resolution to President Coolidge ... a permanent organization of enlightened and militant student-opinion on all questions of national and international importance." At Schenectady, N. Y., the National Council of the Y. M. C. A. announced that, following a sectional conference on the World Court among students of colleges in the state, it would conduct a straw vote in every college in the U. S., and convey the result to Congress. Object: "Fostering an interest in the World Court among college students."

Profundo

Dulcet contribution to the anvil chorus, What's Wrong with U. S. Education? by one Romeyn Berry of Cornell in his University newspaper: "We have just been having the usual October competitions for the Glee Club. There were discovered some beautiful, clear tenor voices and two or three rich baritones. But not in the whole crowd was there a single old-fashioned bull bass. That seems altogether too significant of the times. What this University needs, what all American universities need right now, is less intellect and more boys who shave blue and chew tobacco, and who when they sing in the back room can produce those rumbling profundo notes from the waistline."

*With the exception of those pertaining to Duke, all the figures quoted in this column were compiled in 1924. The endowments of these universities are, of course, greater today than they were then. The present endowment of Yale, for example, is $41,646,988.