Education: Who's Whence

(2 of 3)

On assuming office, said Acting President Brett: "I don't suppose I shall at tempt to initiate any new situations under the circumstances. My main purpose will be to attempt to preserve the integrity of the college as far as State issues are concerned."*

Princeton Hits Bottom

A slight, gentle little man with a small mustache and an Airedale terrier walked down one of Princeton's quiet, leafstrewn streets one afternoon last week and turned in at University Field. As soon as the burly young men who were punting, passing, scrimmaging over the scarred grass saw the visitor they immediately dropped their practice and gathered about him.

For although California's energetic Sproul or Chicago's youthful Hutchins or Columbia's voluble Butler might go out to have a word with the football team, it is almost unknown for Princeton's quiet, academic Dr. John Grier Hibben to do so. What he told the varsity squad was simple. He said that the unprecedented series of defeats which Princeton has suffered this fall (from Brown, Cornell, Navy) indicated that Princeton had hit bottom. Logically he prophesied that in the remaining games (with Chicago, Lehigh, Yale) the team was bound to do better. When he had finished the team went back to practice. President Hibben walked off the field, followed by his Airedale.

If President Hibben's interest in the university's athletic fortunes pleased robust Princeton alumni, the subsequent events of the evening must have been even more heartening for, excited by a football rally, the undergraduates put on a display of Real Old Princeton Enthusiasm. About 1,500 of the student body started bonfires after the meeting, tossed some of their room fixtures on the blaze, then scoured the town for combustibles. The general disorder culminated in minor riot, with freshmen battling sophomores for the privilege of entering Renwick's, an icecream parlor forbidden them. Traffic was blocked on Nassau Street (Lincoln Highway), New York-Philadelphia busses were halted, rocked. And, as usual, the pious statue of the Christian Student was toppled over.

Dean Christian Gauss took names, chided, meted moderate discipline. In Chicago the Princeton team played a footling, scoreless tie.

U. of Utopia

Assembled at Chapel Hill last week was the third annual Southern Conference on Education, guests of the University of North Carolina. Most of the pedagogs at the gathering were Southerners, but young President Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago made the pithiest point, in his discussion of "Utopia University." There, he said, "Hours and residence requirements as criteria for winning college degrees and such time-honored titles as graduate school and junior and senior college" would be supplanted by an institution of higher learning divided into the professional schools and four divisions in art: humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, biological sciences.

Spank