Battered Bulldog

"It is hard," wrote the Harvard Crimson tolerantly, "to view riots in New Haven with the same alarm as those in Nyasaland." The pother at Yale had begun the week before, when a fine fall of late winter snow had coincided with a fettlesome rise of early spring sap. When, at 10 o'clock one night, the Harkness bells clanged out "Bulldog, Bulldog," the results were more or less predictable. Frosh surged out of dormitories like beer from a sprung keg, and began pitching snowballs. Brawlers leaked over locked gates and through classroom buildings into the streets, made a token charge at that often-bloodied Manassas of Yale riots, the Hotel Taft.

Windows in a car and a bus were smashed before town police showed up, roughly packed the hooting collegians back into their dormitories--then, in an uncommon breach of the Geneva Convention for such affairs, followed the students inside and broke down a door to arrest undergraduate wrongdoers. Police bag: 24 wet-handed scholars.

God Save the Queen. The commotion might have ended there; the only event of significance the following day was the sudden "brief illness" of the city's Mayor Richard C. Lee, shortly before he was to address undergraduates on "Building a Greater New Haven." But the day after, a St. Patrick's Day parade bugled through the campus.

For a while, nothing happened; a Knights of Columbus contingent even grinned when a few students quavered out God Save the Queen as they passed. Then, toward the parade's end, a snowball hit a motorcycle cop who had been holding back crowds by gunning his tricycle back and forth. Almost everyone managed to be wrongheaded about what followed. The national vice president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians nonsensically protested that the disturbance was an attack on Roman Catholicism; Yale students howled that it was hobnailed police brutality; and Yale's President A. Whitney Griswold charged it to "childishness" and "boorishness" on the part of students, made an apology to townspeople that most undergraduates thought was too abject.

The Wet Swastika. What seems clear is that New Haven police charged and swung their nightsticks with unnecessary relish as they tried to disperse a crowd that probably did not need dispersing. One Yalie got an eight-stitch dent in his skull, and a young, chesterfield-wearing history teacher was arrested and then, he claims, punched in the kidneys. A fire truck showed up, hosed down a dormitory that had a swastika and yacht flags in its windows. By the end of the brawl, 16 Yalemen, most of them the worse for wear, had been wagoned off to police headquarters--where they were released for trial next month.

By week's end police were admitting privately that "some of the lads swung when they should have nodded," and collegians were excusing the cops: "They're not of the higher intelligence groups, I feel." Alumni were telling each other that the St. Patrick's hoo-ha did not measure up to the 1919 battle between college boys and parading veterans of World War I. Students were not even very mad at their prexy any longer; Whitney Griswold, who promised to kick out students for any more bad behavior, finally admitted that both sides had cause for grievance, and said he would confer with Mayor Lee. For a fillip, the university prepared this week to play host to a long-planned conference of campus police from 18 Eastern colleges. The cops were to discuss, among other things, how to put down a student disturbance.

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