Education: Battered Bulldog

“It is hard,” wrote the Harvard Crimson tolerantly, “to view riots inNew Haven with the same alarm as those in Nyasaland.” The pother atYale had begun the week before, when a fine fall of late winter snowhad coincided with a fettlesome rise of early spring sap. When, at 10o’clock one night, the Harkness bells clanged out “Bulldog, Bulldog,”the results were more or less predictable. Frosh surged out ofdormitories like beer from a sprung keg, and began pitching snowballs.Brawlers leaked over locked gates and through classroom buildings intothe streets, made a token charge at that often-bloodied Manassas ofYale riots, the Hotel Taft.

Windows in a car and a bus were smashed before town police showed up,roughly packed the hooting collegians back into theirdormitories—then, in an uncommon breach of the Geneva Convention forsuch affairs, followed the students inside and broke down a door toarrest undergraduate wrongdoers. Police bag: 24 wet-handed scholars.

God Save the Queen. The commotion might have ended there; the only eventof significance the following day was the sudden “brief illness” of thecity’s Mayor Richard C. Lee, shortly before he was to addressundergraduates on “Building a Greater New Haven.” But the day after, aSt. Patrick’s Day parade bugled through the campus.

For a while, nothing happened; a Knights of Columbus contingent evengrinned when a few students quavered out God Save the Queen as theypassed. Then, toward the parade’s end, a snowball hit a motorcycle copwho had been holding back crowds by gunning his tricycle back andforth. Almost everyone managed to be wrongheaded about what followed.The national vice president of the Ancient Order of Hiberniansnonsensically protested that the disturbance was an attack on RomanCatholicism; Yale students howled that it was hobnailed policebrutality; and Yale’s President A. Whitney Griswold charged it to”childishness” and “boorishness” on the part of students, made anapology to townspeople that most undergraduates thought was too abject.

The Wet Swastika. What seems clear is that New Haven police charged andswung their nightsticks with unnecessary relish as they tried todisperse a crowd that probably did not need dispersing. One Yalie gotan eight-stitch dent in his skull, and a young, chesterfield-wearinghistory teacher was arrested and then, he claims, punched in thekidneys. A fire truck showed up, hosed down a dormitory that had aswastika and yacht flags in its windows. By the end of the brawl, 16Yalemen, most of them the worse for wear, had been wagoned off topolice headquarters—where they were released for trial next month.

By week’s end police were admitting privately that “some of the ladsswung when they should have nodded,” and collegians were excusing thecops: “They’re not of the higher intelligence groups, I feel.” Alumniwere telling each other that the St. Patrick’s hoo-ha did not measureup to the 1919 battle between college boys and parading veterans ofWorld War I. Students were not even very mad at their prexy any longer;Whitney Griswold, who promised to kick out students for any more badbehavior, finally admitted that both sides had cause for grievance, andsaid he would confer with Mayor Lee. For a fillip, the universityprepared this week to play host to a long-planned conference of campuspolice from 18 Eastern colleges. The cops were to discuss, among otherthings, how to put down a student disturbance.