Education: Slaves for Sale

“Go to your room!” is a command whose meaning is portentously familiar to every Yaleman. And, because the ceremony which takes place under Yale’s elms on the third Thursday in every May is always fully reported in metropolitan newspapers, any outsiders are well aware of the tense excitement, the sense of a noble and picturesque tradition that comes to Yale on Tap Day. But there was once a time when Yale’s four Senior Societies— Skull & Bones, Scroll & Key, Wolf’s Head, Elihu Club—were taken more seriously than now. In that day Yale would have shuddered if its dean had said, as Dean Clarence Whittlesey Mendell said three years ago: “[The Senior Societies] must face the charge that the Senior Society men are no longer, through the Fraternities, establishing standards which in themselves justify their existence.” And, although there have always been periodic outbursts against the “social system,” no one would have taken the Yale Alumni Weekly seriously if it had called Tap Day, as it did last fortnight, “a barbarous and juvenile exhibition of bad taste and worse manners.”

The Weekly demanded a “new and different Yale society system, based on . . . new conditions and on those about to be inaugurated under the eleven-college [House Plan] system.” Pointing out that “from a modern class of over 500 men, obviously no selection of 45 (and including the Elihu Club, which has fallen into the system, 601 men can longer be possible on the old basis,” it reprinted a “courageous” letter written to the Yale Daily News by Wilder Hobson, a 1928 member of Scroll & Key.

In his time an able chairman of the Yale Literary Magazine, Keysman Hobson wrote: “I hazard the guess that Tap Day is doomed, along with the antimacassar, the wall motto, and the works of Sarah Orne Jewett. . . .

“The true value of the Society . . . lies in its encouragement of understanding between man and man. Internally this holds good; externally it discourages understanding about as effectively as the most fuliginous medieval cabal. . . . It marches solemnly through the night . . . and disappears into forbidding shrines where its rites are apparently joined by representatives of the colored race.”

Last week the Weekly continued its attack, said “its importance warrants full discussion by the Yale public.” And in The Harkness Hoot, newest, most forthright of Yale journals, appeared “The Elks in Our Midst,” by Richard S. Childs, Yale junior, suggesting that the Senior Societies be abolished by boycott, that the Junior class refrain from appearing “like slaves for sale upon the campus on Tap Day.” The Yale Daily News, edited by juniors, and whose chairman is automatically in line for tapping, had printed Keysman Hobson’s letter, and reprinted the Weekly editorials. Last week, making no mention of Societies, it said: “We can only say that the Hoot would be more palatable if it always had good taste, and more useful if it presented both sides of an argument.”