Education: Princeton & Patriotism

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(See front cover} Throughout the land last week, this week and next week, 1934's college seniors pack their trunks in hot little rooms, cluster on shaded campuses to say goodby, sweat under caps & gowns as they march up to receive diplomas which round out the first great period of their lives. Columbia had already sent 1,000 away from Morningside, their ears ringing with the counsels of Harvard's President James Bryant Conant and of their own pontifical President Nicholas Murray Butler, presiding over his 32nd commencement. At Cambridge next week President Conant was to preside for the first time over a commencement of his own, with frosty President Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell back to talk to some 650 seniors about "War and the League of Nations." Yalemen were wondering how many more commencements would be graced by President James Rowland Angell, 65. At this, his 13th, he was to preach the baccalaureate, award an LL. D. to President Roosevelt' (see p. 48), send away some 600 seniors. Joseph Sweetman Ames. 69, who has been student, professor and finally president at Johns Hopkins since 1883, was leaving no doubt in Hopkins men's minds. This week he was to announce that next year's commencement will be his last.

At Princeton President Harold Willis Dodds was to preside at his first commencement. Main feature was to be the second annual faculty-alumni forum on world affairs, with an address by Professor Tyler Dennett, president-elect of Williams. For more than two months Princeton seniors have borne on their white "beer suits" a Blue Eagle with President Dodds's head replacing the bird's. Next week the president was to hand their own class president Arthur Stephen ("Princeton's Best") Lane, the key to the university. Then Senior Lane would lead his 450 classmates behind Nassau Hall where, puffing long-stemmed clay pipes to be smashed on the Princeton cannon when the ceremonies were over, they would hear his presidential address and the class history.

So seniors have behaved in Junes innumerable. In his love for fun, ceremony. ! tradition the undergraduate of 1934 differs little from the undergraduate of 1924 or 1914. But something has happened to I his thinking which, by all accounts, sets him apart from his predecessors.

He was not born until after the Titanic went down one April night in 1912. To him the War is history, not a personal memory. He has lived all his conscious life in a post-War world. He was playing hide & seek during the age of Flaming Youth. When he was in high school the Crash came and that was something real enough to make a mark upon him. It cut his allowance and put a furrow in his father's brow. He heard talk of hard times and an uncertain future. He saw breadlines. And worst of all, as his time to enter it drew near, there has come a terrible fear that the world would have no place for him.

These facts have given him an interest in society, economics and world affairs unknown to his predecessors. In 1914 the War crept on a college generation unaware. All the senior of 1924 had to worry about was which job to take. The undergraduate of 1934 knows where the next war may come, and why, and who will suffer by it. He is grimly determined that if the world has no place for him, the world and not he will have to change.