Education: Unique Burden

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Last week U. S. undergraduates (some 1,250,000 of them), always new, always the same, arrived on their traditional campuses to> start the fall term in the traditional way. As usual, they chattered of football prospects, fraternities, girls, played impromptu games of touch football.

Princeton freshmen donned their black dinks (skullcaps) and black ties, stepped into the gutter to let upperclassmen pass, went to the President's Reception to dance with 250 debutantes. University of Pennsylvania's freshmen dined together for the-first time in a new commons, afterwards-paraded to Benjamin Franklin's statue in front of Weightman Hall, then to a rally on Franklin Field. At Harvard the big news was that Cambridge University's famed Semanticist Ivor Armstrong Richards (The Meaning of Meaning) would set sail from England this week to be a visiting lecturer. Not to be outdone, Yale announced that it had bagged University of London's famed Polish Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Busy Yalelings began to heel the News, lazy ones to loaf along the Fence.

Collegians dealt with war and war's rumors in characteristic undergraduate fashion. Princetonians, who few years ago launched the Veterans of Future Wars, last week organized an American Independence League to keep the U. S. out cf war, quickly dispatched letters of correspondence to other colleges. On some 300 campuses, undergraduates signed up for the Federal Government's new pilot training courses. Among them, because they wanted to fly, too, were girls at Mills College (Calif.) and Lake Erie College (Ohio).

Amid the cheerful cacophony as the class of 1943 was born, an ominous rumble came from college presidents. Looking gravely upon their fresh-faced flocks, assembled in chapels and halls, the presidents welcomed them with words of doom. Instead of calling their students "heirs to the heritage of civilization," the presidents counseled youth to prepare to salvage what was left of civilization after World War II. Typical excerpts:

Columbia University's Nicholas Murray Butler: "[The] world, so far as its professed and constantly extolled ideals are concerned, is in a state of well-nigh total collapse. . . . Modern man has returned ... to the jungle. . . . The great philosophers, men of letters and men of science v.ho dominated the thought ... of the past 200 years are no longer recognized or ever referred to as offering guidance for conduct and for public policy."

Harvard's James Bryant Conant: "Education as usual should be our slogan. If this seems too tame a slogan for these exciting days, let me remind you . . . that this nation now emerges from chaos as the significant home of the arts, of literature, of scholarship, of science. ... I ... make certain assumptions about the next ten years . . . [that] we are not facing the end of civilization . . . that the devastation of the European war will place a unique burden upon the citizens of this nation to carry forward the culture of our time."

Yale's Charles Seymour: "Whatever the outcome, it is certain that in the future a heavier responsibility will rest upon the United States for the preservation and the fostering of the things most precious to a university — the things of the mind, of the spirit, of beauty, individual freedom, intellectual power."