Phi Beta Kappa & "Kitty"

P: Take twelve Phi Beta Kappa men and twelve football men 25 years after their graduation from the University of California. Of the footballers, nine are living (one was murdered, one died of tuberculosis, one of cancer) and one is in Who's Who. Of the "Phi Betes," ten are living (one was murdered, one died of tuberculosis) and all twelve are in Who's Who.

P: Louis Israel Dublin, statistician for Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., discovered by investigating 38,269 Eastern college graduates that Phi Beta Kappa men and honor students live longer than athletes and plain graduates.

Phi Beta Kappa is aware that some of its members, on the strength of these statistics, feel faintly "better-than-thou." Last fortnight it published a manifesto:

"Laying aside its aloofness, Phi Beta Kappa aligns itself with those who are seeking to lead the world out of its slough of despond. For the first time in 150 years this erudite--some even call it snobbish-- society of college and university intellectuals faces the world with a declaration."

Phi Beta Kappa's declaration appeared last week in the form of a neat, handsome quarterly called The American Scholar ($2 the year). Highbrow but spirited, the Scholar will publish no fiction, will seek scholarly but not too technical articles, occasional verse. Its point of view may become as various as that of its board of ten editors, who include Dean Ada Louise Comstock of Radcliffe, President William Allan Neilson of Smith, smart Author John Erskine. popular Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton, Editor Will David Howe of Scribners', Dr. John Huston Finley of the New York Times. Editor-in-chief is William Allison Shimer, 37. onetime philosophy teacher at Ohio State. He is secretary of the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa and of the Phi Beta Kappa Foundation. Cost of The American Scholar will be met by Phi Beta Kappa. Since little or nothing will be paid for contributions, it is expected to be selfsupporting.

Save for Chairman Alvan Emile Duerr of the Interfraternity Conference, all contributors to the first issue of The American Scholar are Phi Beta Kappas. Among them: Owen D. Young, Mary Emma Woolley (see p. 14), President Frank Aydelotte of Swarthmore College, Physicist Karl Taylor Compton, Hermann Hagedorn, John William Davis, Dorothy Canfield Fisher. The casual reader, glancing through the high intellectual pages of The American Scholar, might well wonder if some one had not made a horrible mistake in printing this:

When your steps to Cambridge track

Whack the Fac!

Do not pat them on the back--

Tell them all the things they lack!

That's the treatment for the Fac. . . .

What? No aces in the pack!

Whack the Fac.

Does your girl give you the sack?

Can't you please rich Uncle Zach?

Whack, smack, thwack!

When your steps to Cambridge track

Don't forget to whack the Fac.

There was no mistake. The author of this sprightly rhyme is a tall, stooped, 72-year-old scholar, possessor of Harvard's snowiest and second longest* beard. George Lyman ("Kitty") Kittredge has been Gurney Professor of English since the chair was founded in 1916. Famed is "Kitty" for his knowledge of Chaucer, for many a dissertation on Shakespeare, witchcraft, and a monograph, Who Was Sir Thomas Malory? which identified for the first time the author of the Morte d'Arthur. Harvard today admires him (with a certain awe) as a bon vivant, hard worker, wearer of very light suits, reader of every J. S. Fletcher detective story.

*All-time record for length is held by Professor-emeritus Albert Bushnell ("Bushy'') Hart.

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