In Tennessee

Since the Scopes trial, many people have felt (unjustly enough) that their eyes had surely been opened to the condition of things in Tennessee--a wildwood state, populated by bearded illiterates whose ears still rumble with echoes of the shooting at Bull Run, whose Bible is a shotgun, whose primer is a bottle and who believe in Santa Claus. Last week Vanderbilt University (in Nashville) made an announcement which somewhat corrected this impression. Trustees and alumni, having completed their semicentennial celebration, started a nationwide drive to raise $4,000,000 for the department of science. Said Chancellor James H. Kirkland: "Vanderbilt's answer to the episode at Dayton is the building of new laboratories for the teaching of science."

Comparison

Those two bulwarks of education in the East, the Universities of Yale and of Harvard, have furnished grist for many a generality. Harvard men, whose impression of Yale may have been limited to a distorted glimpse of Harkness Tower as beheld from a motor car on the way to the Yale Bowl, are usually quite ready to proffer their opinions of Yale's scholastic, athletic and social systems; Yale men not infrequently subject the "red bellies" of Harvard to a voluble and humorous dissection. Last week a Yale man and a Harvard man published their views of their respective colleges in an article in the Harvard Crimson (undergraduate daily). These two men were one and the same--a certain Lucius Beebe, who, after being ousted from Yale, entered the class of 1927 at Harvard. Since a mind divided against itself cannot cavil, and a broken allegiance is apt to mean a sound opinion, undergraduates and graduates of both colleges found Student Beebe's views interesting. Said he:

Yale, "A student's degree actually depends upon such impertinent matters as staying within a parsimonious allowance of class and chapel cuts, his chapel attendance, the company he keeps, his tastes in recreation and his chastity.

"He is subjected practically every other Sunday to a moral fight-talk by Dean Charles R. Brown of the Divinity School, who once in a moment of ventriloquistic inspiration impersonated the Savior and has since been known as the 'Ecclesiastical Barnum.'*

"On the other hand the instruction at New Haven is of unqualified excellence in practically every department. A faculty of scholars and critics who stand second to none in their fields, is what unquestionably makes Yale a great college and university.

"The average undergraduate has a very real interest in his courses, at least in those he has been allowed to select for himself, and is well read in and opinionated on questions of the moment. He can and does discuss artistic and intellectual matters without being labeled an esthete.

"As a unit it is altogether merry and kind and mildly sophisticated, with a great joy in being Yale men and a profound contempt for any comic or unworthy trading on the name it bears.

Harvard. "A man is not tethered with limited cuts, if he be in good standing, nor is he checked up and nagged over every trifling failure in hour test or quiz.

"The Harvard office regards a man as entirely capable of looking out for his outside affairs himself and is not troubled for his morals, religion, tastes, or opinions on the League of Nations. He is judged solely by his academic record.

"The Cambridge undergraduate is not herded willy-nilly into chapel and as a body he doesn't give a hoot for a chapel and hardly two hoots for organized religion.

"The Harvard state of mind has been characterized as one of 'indifference.' So it is. It represents a rather patrician lack of concern for other people's affairs."

*Needless to say, this is hardly fair to good Dean Brown.--Ed.