Education: Education Notes, Nov. 29, 1926

"Unique," "remarkable," welcomed Yale University's drive, just announced, for $20,000,000 to be entirely devoted to raising teachers' salaries and to research work—not one cent for buildings. Yale salaries since 1913 have increased 50%, living expenses 78%. Minimum increase of salary under the proposed budget will be $221,000. Yale has 32,000 living alumni, of whom the press noted three—Chauncey Mitchell Depew, '56, Arthur Twining Hadley, '76, William Howard Taft, '78—as in the forefront of the drive. But, as everyone knows, a University drive depends for its success primarily upon the wits, the diplomacy, the oratory, the industry, of its President—in this case, James Rowland Angell, smart son of a smart father, the late famed President James Burrill Angell of the University of Michigan. Poor Columbia University, whose student fees pay only 40% of its maintenance cost, received only $80,000 donations through its alumni fund last year. In order to provide against future impoverishment, William Vinton King, Chairman of the Board of the Columbia Trust Co., Manhattan, and a life member of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University, has willed a tithe (one-tenth) of his estate, after death, to Columbia and last week urged, almost demanded that other alumni do the same. Raze. "The women's colleges of this university should be leveled to the ground." So voted the Oxford Union, debating society, last week, 223 to 198. While Phi Beta Kappa men were packing their bags to go to William & Mary where, this week, they celebrate the 150th anniversary of their founding; while majestic little Dr. Henry van Dyke was writing, in Princeton, the speech which he will deliver to his brother Phi Betas, an interesting item appeared in the press. Half of Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa men this year are Jews—five of the eight juniors elected, and a large portion of the 22 seniors. Despite the snobbish evidences of class prejudice which, at such racially-tinged colleges as Harvard, as once at Columbia, the Nordic students betray toward their cleverer competitors such men as Bleiweiss, Stamm, Bernstein, Sobell, Isaacs, Swirske, Abrahams and Solomon, won their places by merit.

Unsocial Engineers. Not enough social insight nor responsibility, concluded the Society for Promotion of Engineering Education last week, among other charges laid to U. S. engineering students and faculties. The report followed a three-year investigation in the U. S. and Europe, at a cost of $200,000. Recommendations: 1) more study of the humanities and economics; 2) elimination, by stricter entrance examination, of misfits; 3) provision for better teachers.

Discipline. One hundred Harvard Law School freshmen last week received a formal letter from Dean Roscoe Pound, which made them pale. Each one had cut his Saturday class to attend the Harvard-Brown football game, and now he read: "You are now listed as prima facie an undesirable student."