Wedlock

Faith in their professors has been evinced by undergraduates of the University of North Carolina. According to the New Student (intercollegiate news bulletin), a group of North Carolina seniors petitioned for an addition to the 1,000-odd courses listed in the catalog--for a comprehensive course on Marriage.

The petition was granted. Twice a week, specialists now lecture on the social, economic, medical and psychological aspects of wedlock. Upwards of 100 students take notes, discuss. Who the "specialists" are, what their experience, authority and tenets, were not announced. The University of North Carolina, unlike many institutions with vociferous press bureaus, sought no publicity for its experiment.

Bok-Wilson

All the world knows a certain horse-jawed, long-nosed, highbrowed countenance with deep cheek grooves beside the wide mouth; eyes hooded, alert and slanting slightly downward into a squint at the outside corners; the high, narrow cranium flanked by lean temples and longish ears. It is not an uncommon face in the U. S. but a single man brought its fame far above the fame of many another face--Woodrow Wilson. Today the type is perhaps best seen in onetime Editor Edward W. Bok of the Ladies' Home Journal, who last week bestowed $150,000 upon Princeton University for a Woodrow Wilson professorship in English literature.

The striking likeness between the Messrs. Wilson and Bok was a source of pleasure to them both. If they lunched together, friends of Mr. Bok would accost him afterwards: "Was that your brother?" And once on a train going to Manhattan when they were wearing precisely similar suits of pepper-and-salt mixture and twin grey felt hats, Mr. Wilson is said to have said: "Look more like each other than ever, don't we? Well, that's an advantage for me. The people in the car will think you are the Governor, and as the Governor of New Jersey isn't very popular just now, I'll get all the pleasant bows intended for the more acceptable editor of the Ladies' Home Journal." Sure enough, a lady in one of the cars they passed through drove Mr. Wilson into the washroom convulsed with glee by bowing and saluting him as Mr. Bok.*

But of course one does not endow a $150,000 professorship to commemorate an accident of nature. Editor Bok's admiration for Woodrow Wilson had its roots in a temperamental affinity that naturally existed between two self-assertive individualists who could agree on many things; and in one strong-minded man's appreciation of another's "beautiful thinking machine." Also, Mr. Bok, with a self-educated man's capacity for admiring education in others, never ceased to marvel at Mr. Wilson's command of language, including slang. He even asked Mr. Wilson once how he came by his facile diction, and the then president of Princeton is said to have explained: "From my father. He had a reverence for words, and he would never allow us to misuse a word. Not only would he point out the misuse, but he would explain its misuse and stress the correct use of the word. And he was always interesting. I do not know a man who could be so absorbingly interesting in the explanation as to the use of a single word."

So that is the object to be furthered by the Bok-given Woodrow Wilson literature chair at Princeton as announced last week: "To commemorate Mr. Wilson's mastery of spoken and written English . . . and to further appreciation of the best English literature."

P. B. K.

With due and fitting ceremony, and a banquet and speeches, Phi Beta Kappa, high brotherhood of scholastic distinction in U. S. colleges, last week celebrated the approach of the 150th anniversary of its founding, at the Hotel Mayflower, in Washington, D. C. The society's president, President Emeritus Charles Franklin Thwing of Western Eeserve University, was on hand, eruditely genial. Members of the mother chapter were there--President J. A. Chandler and Drs. R. M. Hughes and J. Lesslie Hall, of the College of William & Mary (Williamsburg, Va.) where (the year after Paul Revere rode through Massachusetts) one John Heath and four comrades started a secret fraternity into which 45 others were initiated in the next four years, and which chartered chapters at Harvard, Yale and elsewhere.

John Heath's chapter-brothers last week performed rites initiating, causa honoris, Sir Esme Howard, the British Ambassador, who is now entitled to dangle upon his watch-chain the familiar golden watch-key graven with three stars and a pointing hand.

The Keymen have planned to assemble again next December at Williamsburg to dedicate a building whose cornerstone they laid last June (TIME, June 15), a memorial headquarters for the United Chapters of P. B. K. toward which the 40,000 living members have been contributing a million-dollar endowment fund. (Last week, Keyman John D. Rockefeller Jr., Brown '97, contributed $100,000.)

The distinction of some of the committee for last week's celebration foretold the distinction that will attach to the ceremony in December. There were Senator Carter Glass of Virginia (toastmaster), Vice President Charles G. Dawes, Chief Justice William H. Taft, Chinese Minister Dr. Alfred Sze, Representative Theodore E. Burton and Dr. Gilbert H. Grosvenor, head of the National Geographic Society. Other U. S. notables whose undergraduate studies or mature achievements have won them membership in P. B. K.: John W. Davis, Charles E. Hughes, Theodore Roosevelt, Michael Pupin, Owen D. Young, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis D. Brandeis, Edward Terry Sanford, Harlan Fiske Stone, Robert Frost, Bernard M. Baruch, Bainbridge Colby, Dwight W. Morrow, George W. Wickersham, Mary E. Woolley.

Young college men and women failing to graduate in the top tenth of their classes (the P. B. K. qualification) should not, however, despair of attaining post-graduate eminence. Let them consider the following college graduates who are not Keymen: Franklin D. Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, J. Pierpont Morgan, Clarence Dillon, Sinclair Lewis, John Hays Hammond Jr., Arthur Curtiss James, William Allen White, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Albert C. Ritchie, Gifford Pinchot, Robert LaFollette,-- Edwin Arlington Robinson.

Contributions

A trenchant contribution to current thought on higher education was to be found in last week's Nation.

"Project" Studies. The article was from Dr. Glenn Frank, who has spent the past year studying at first hand the problems of a modern mammoth state institution, the University of Wisconsin, for whose presidential chair he left a cosy editor's desk on the Century magazine (TIME, May 25, 1925), More than ever impressed with the enormous weight and diversity of the knowledge humanity has been harvesting for itself in the past century, Dr. Frank pondered the problem of acquainting freshman and sophomores with the nature of the entire crop before turning them loose to pitch, thrash and store a special portion. He concluded by wondering if there was not great merit in "project" studies as advocated by Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn and others--assigning to underclassmen single historic episodes --perhaps the Greek civilization in the freshman year, and the 19th Century U. S. for sophomores-- and helping them to take it to bits, see how, why and whither it worked. Dr. Meiklejohn has proposed the "project" for small colleges. Dr. Frank indorsed the plan for a large university because, "unless with decent promptness we bring a fresh coherence and fruitful comprehensiveness into . . . freshman and sophomore years of our colleges of liberal arts, the junior-college movement! may proceed as a merely mechanical split-off, a merely administrative secession, with no meaning beyond a decentralization of the chaos. . . ."

Tap Day

"Go to your room!"

One afternoon last week a familiar U. S. scene was enacted for the 94th annual time. The Juniors of Yale College gathered on their inner campus and among them prowled the members of the secret senior honor societies. Hushed with excitement, doubt, hope, anticipation, the candidates stood in strained groups until, singly, the messengers found their men, smote them on the back and uttered the accolade's famed salutation:

"Go to your room!"

Roars of approbation greeted "tapping" of Lawrence M. Noble of Syracuse, N. Y., first man chosen by Skull and Bones; of Guy Richards of Woodmere, N. Y., first man for Scroll and Key; of John C. Lord of Tarrytown, N. Y., first man for Wolf's Head; and of Van Buren Taliaferro of Manhattan, first for Elihu Club. The even greater honors of being 15th and last man "tapped" for the four societies (in the order named) fell respectively to Philip W. Bunnell of Scranton, Pa., Hannibal Hamlin of Brooklyn, James G. Butler of Hartford, Conn., and George F. Scherer* of Washington, D. C. John J. Pierson of Manhattan had the hardihood to refuse the accolades of Wolf's Head and Elihu Club, preferring to await election to "Bones" or "Keys"-- which he did not get.

Yale's honor societies are far from unique in nature, but at no U. S. college are inscrutable orders taken more seriously, nor have they such compelling interest for the world-at-large. At the University of Virginia there is the famed Raven, dedicated to the dark memory of Edgar Allan Poe. At Colgate there are the weird Skull and Scroll, and Gorgon's Head. University of California has its Skull and Key and its Golden Bear. Other famed senior societies: Owl and Serpent (Chicago), Iron Cross (Wisconsin), Skull and Snakes (Leland Stanford), Iron Wedge (Minnesota), Quill and Dagger (Cornell), Innocents (Nebraska), Mystical Seven and Skull and Serpent (Wesleyan).

Yale's secret societies have been widely advertised not only by the eminence of many of their members and the interest of Princeton and Harvard (where such things do not exist), but also by novels/- of wide circulation in which the societies were scored by a disappointed Yale graduate and a popular female novelist.

Housed in tomblike buildings, "Bones" and "Keys," the two oldest** Yale orders, have given rise to a wealth of legend and speculation among the uninitiated, to the shrewdness or folly of which none but the sphinxlike brotherhoods could testify. So closely are their secrets kept that even the janitors of their sanctuaries must be made members and sworn to silence. So jealously are their very names preserved that the members, even as middle-aged and greying men, will affect deafness or stony inattention when an outsider utters a word or question relevant to the subject. If the reference or question is pressed, the initiate displays either irritation or chilling dignity and often moves away, leaving spectators either amused or awed that any rites and mysteries can so bind civilized men.

The room-leaving habit of "Bones" men has been burlesqued by members of other colleges, as for example the Princeton Triangle Club which more than once has inserted the sacred name in a line of its musical comedy and arranged that, as the line was read, several tatterdemalion vagrants in the audience should stumble to their feet and make for an exit.

While nothing could be more futile than prying into the secrets of organizations whose purposes are obviously innocuous and whose existences supply as much stimulus to exemplary undergraduate endeavor as they do to alleged snobbery and social intrigue, still, curiosity is at least the second strongest of passions and a body of fairly reliable fact has become public property--through indiscreet wives, brazen peepers and sheer accident--with the currency of which the inscrutable ones would not be so foolish as to quarrel. Thus, it is known that one "tomb" is furnished in the acme of masculine comfort, all its furniture being heavily upholstered in black leather; that over a bathtub hangs a portrait in oils of Napoleon; that each "tomb" has its windowless "shrine" or ceremonial chamber where the most unmentionable rites are performed; that the central motive of each brotherhood is mutual fealty and assistance in time of need, and the maintenance of a code of ideals, emotional if not spiritual, gentlemanly if not militantly "moral."

Other odds and ends of knowledge gathered by outside observers are:

That a formality among "Keys" men is wearing their pins at all times, in all places: in swimming, inside the bathing suit; in bed, upon the pajamas; bathing, in the hand or mouth. (It is said that once a pin was swallowed, causing its owner excruciating pain and a long journey to find a doctor to whom he could speak freely.)

That "Bones" men, at the risk of seeming boorish, may not speak to a soul after leaving an evening's orgy in the tomb, before the next sunup.

That the end of a "Keys" ritual consists in marching out upon the steps of the tomb and singing the society's private song, "Gaily the Troubadour." (Of a frosty winter's evening in New Haven, Conn., or after the wedding of a "Keys" man, auditors of all ages and affiliations whatever will stand to listen to this ringing chanson, the rendition of which is invariably exceptionally fine, as "Keys" seldom fails to enroll one or more of the best voices in each class.)

That out of the "Bones" tomb on initiation day, a burly naked arm shoots forth to clutch and drag inside the proselytes. (The arm belongs, usually, to a prominent athlete, of which "Bones" has enrolled many.)

That there is a visible difference in the general type of "Bones" and "Keys" men, the former seeming to be oddly assorted leaders in college activities, men of "strong," "exemplary" or "brilliant" characteristics and usually conservative in policies and conduct; the "Keys" men tending to be more congenial among themselves before election, more often social patricians, less serious and, often, less able in activities, and if anything still more conservative in policies and conduct. In general the Wolf's Head type is Bonesian; the Elihu Club, Keyish.

That on no account do "Bones" or "Keys" men let it seem that they are conscious of the existence of the other's society.

Of rumors and legends there is no end. One story has it that in the middle of the last century, while the societies were still young, some daring undergraduate spies invaded the "Bones" tomb--and never more were heard of in this life. Others say that fabulous treasures and curiosities are stored within the various cryptic walls, brought there by brethren from high office* or daring adventures-- the original Declaration of Independence, the very skull of Napoleon, a wolf shot by Buffalo Bill, a key to the main gate of the Vatican. Wildest of all are the rumors about what is done at the societies' meetings, for these begin twice weekly at seven and often last until four or five in the morning. Some say that naked male Negroes figure in one set of rites; that a secret language and lore are studied; that readings are held from the Classics; that there are rites of "purification" by fire and silence. . . .

There is scoffing aplenty at the gravity of secret societists but impartial observers would be hard put to decide whether the inside or the outside attitude is the most "absurd." Both phenomena -- secrecy and publicity--are universal.

*The incident is described in one of Mr. Bok's autobiographies, Twice Thirty (Scribner).

*" Young Bob." Both the late "Old Bob" and his wife, Belle Case LaFollette, won their Keys.

/-Combining the first two years of college with the usual high school, to complete elementary work before advanced collegiate work is begun; in vogue especially in California.

*Scherer was the last, but only the llth, lapped for Elihu Club which seldom takes the quota of 15 traditional with the other three societies, and is not shrouded like them in secrecy.

/-Stover AT YALE--Owen McMahon John-son--Stokes (1912). THE COURAGE OF THE COMMONPLACE-- Mary Raymond Shipmau Andrews--Scrib-11 cr (1911).

**Founded in 1832 and 1842, respectively.

*Famed members, living and dead, of "Bones" : William H. Taft, Gifford Pinchot, Harry Payne Whitney, James W. Wadsworth, William Graham Sumner, Walter Camp, Frank B. Brandegee, Chauncey M. Depew, Henry Sloane Coffin, Percy A. Rockefeller, Arthur T. Hadley, William Averell Harriman, William H. Welsh, Timothy Dwight. Of "Keys": Frank L. Polk, George K. Vincent, James Gamble Rogers, Cornelius Vanderbilt Sr., Louis E. Stoddard, Joseph Medill Patterson, Harvey W. Gushing, James R. Sheffield, Thomas DeWitt Cuyler, Moses Taylor, John V. Farwell, John Addison Porter.