C'est La Guerre

Undergraduates last week hardly knew whether they faced the front or hind end of the college year: many accelerating colleges this month begin their year instead of ending it. Colleges casually dropped many another old tradition. Some events in their topsy-turvy week:

> For the first time in its 196-year history, Princeton decided to admit women. They will attend free engineering courses at the university this summer.

> Smith and Vassar announced that they would close for a month or more next winter, to save fuel, electricity and transportation. They will lengthen their Christmas vacations and cut spring holidays.

> Lafayette, which had 60 tons of steel to build additions to its stadium, decided that the stadium could wait, made the steel available to the War Production Board.

> Commencements had fewer trimmings than usual. Most satisfactory was that of the University of Wisconsin, which got a certificate of meritorious service from the Navy, the first awarded to a college, because it had given the Navy's air force five squadrons of "Flying Badgers" (163 flyers all told), more than any other U.S. college. Wisconsin also conferred an honorary LL.D in absentia on General Douglas MacArthur, was rewarded with a message in the General's characteristic prose:

"You have for one thrilling moment transplanted me from the arbitrament of the destructive mechanics of force to the constructive ennoblement of a seat of learning . . . refreshed the battleworn spirit of an old soldier with the fragrance which clusters around the sacred memories of that magic word home."

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