Education: At Yale

Yale University, confronted with a housing problem by reason of increased enrolment, settled the quandry in a manner which seemed, to the unbiased observer, direct enough. A new dormitory was designed, a site chosen on the campus, and early one morning some workmen went out with picks and broke ground. Instantly the University was swept with winds, avalanches, storms, of protest, objection, controversy. The dormitory had been designed as a reproduction of Connecticut Hall, home of the fathers of Yale, in their day the only building on the Campus.* That any other should be erected, whether in imitation or in rivalry, was a thing Yale professors, alumni, undergraduates could ill stomach.

The Yale Daily News, undergraduate newspaper, protested that “the whole matter was brought about in rather underhanded fashion and that the college faculty was purposely disregarded throughout.” A petition signed by 480 students was handed to Dr. James Rowland Angell, President, adjuring him to “take immediate action to suspend work on the foundation . . . until undergraduate opinion shall have been consulted.” Said Lewis S. Welch, onetime editor of the Alumni Weekly: “There is to be set up, without talking it over with the family, a new ‘Old Home,’ an imitation of the place where Yale’s forbears lived. It will make Connecticut Hall a sample, not a shrine.”

In the College Chapel, President Angell addressed the Seniors, Juniors, Sophomores, insisted that the members of the Corporation had the interest and welfare of the campus at heart.

Building operations continued.

* Other buildings bound the rectangular campus on all sides. Connecticut Hall occupies one small corner of the enclosure.