Openers (Cont'd)

Last week students filled out countless official slips, sophomores bedeviled freshmen, college stores did the year's best business, presidents viewed with alarm the state of the world and most colleges and universities settled down to work. The following made news:

P: Colgate's Spartan, white-haired President George Barton Cutten told his students : "The greatest sinners are probably the philanthropists and the doctors. They have done everything they could to keep the unfit. Nature provides immunity to certain diseases by eliminating all those who contract the diseases. Now we have a protected race rather than a resistant race." Of social legislation: "Nothing could threaten the race as seriously as this. It is begging the unfit to be more unfit and inviting the fit to join the ranks of the unfit."

P: Carefully sniffish toward anything "practical," Yale let its single college course in public-speaking lapse last year, met protests by pleading economy. Last week the Yale News, whose lively undergraduate chairman is Jonathan Brewster Bingham, youngest of the seven sons of Connecticut's onetime Senator Hiram Bingham, took rich Yale at its word. Announcing that it would sponsor the non-credit course, the News persuaded a professor to lecture on his own time, hired a fraternity house for a classroom, undertook to pay all expenses, including a taxi to & from class for the professor and one assistant.

P: To new Freshman Henry Morgenthau III, son of the Secretary of the Treasury, and some 2,000 other undergraduates, Princeton's President Harold Willis Dodds said: "College is not a preparation for life; it is life itself. The day-by-day choices you will make here are quite as important, if not more so, than those you will have to make later."

P: Three sons of famed fathers--George Howard Earle IV, Walter Sherman Gifford Jr., Gustavus Franklin Swift Jr.-- and some 1,000 other Harvard freshmen heard President James Bryant Conant advise: "Even during your college career you will find groups of propagandists outside the University ready to use you for their own purposes; you will find them to right and to left. . . , There are plenty of people who are willing and anxious to shout, to march, and to wave flags and banners. I do not feel that this type needs reinforcement from the student body."

P: Glum and nostalgic, Columbia's Nicholas Murray Butler, 73, observed: "Theft, assault, kidnapping, murder, follow each other with tragic frequency. These acts are all done by men and women who have been pupils in our schools and many of them pupils in our colleges as well. . . . It has become customary to abuse and sneer at the little red schoolhouse of two generations ago, but if that little red schoolhouse was presided over by a teacher of rich and warm personality with a genius for impressing himself upon the group of pupils of various ages and stages of advancement which surrounded him, it was an almost ideal educational instrumentality."

P: University of Wyoming enrolled four students in a new four-year course in Recreational Ranching. Prospective dude ranchers will study animal production, livestock management, nutrition, geology, botany, economics, hotel management, bookkeeping, public speaking, journalism, wild life, history of the West.

P: Posted around the campus of Connecticut College for Women was this notice:

"The College Inn is not an approved place. College students may not go there. "Katharine Blunt."

Promptly the proprietors of the College Inn sued President Katharine Blunt for $10,000 damages.

P: Louisiana State University opened a 664-acre farm where needy agricultural students may earn expenses by raising food for the dining halls.

P: To the New England Conference of State Federations of Women's Clubs, one James L. Whitcomb, Brown undergraduate, declaimed: "A new seriousness has gripped the student. More sense--more plain common sense--has been the keynote. For instance, we wear garters."

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