Education: At the Universities

By last week the upturn in college enrollments indicated by early registration reports was definitely established. Graduate enrollments were generally down, upperclass figures showed small change. But the entering freshmen numbered from 10% to 35% more than last year. Harvard had the largest undergraduate enrollment in its history and Pennsylvania State, University of California and University of Texas showed record sum-totals. Other campus news of last fortnight:

¶ At Barnard, Dean Virginia Gildersleeve followed up President Nicholas Murray Butler’s diatribe on youthful manners (TIME, Oct. 8) with these remarks to freshmen: “Perhaps the manners of girls may be better than boys, from what I’ve heard said about them. Nevertheless there is room for improvement. Don’t grab plates of cake at a tea, as I’ve seen college girls do. Don’t elbow your way into an elevator. It may be exhilaration or mob psychology that makes you behave in such a way, but whatever it is you girls must remember that manners are important, a real asset and part of your equipment.”

Turning from manners to voices, Dean Gildersleeve declared: “Barnard is going to give you a chance to improve your voice. They say that American women’s voices are notoriously bad. It’s not the climate that is to blame. It’s something we have just drifted into.”

¶ At Princeton it was announced that Nassau Hall’s bell which has roused students since the university’s founding— first at 5 a. m., later at 6 a. m. and for the past 100 years at 7 a. m.—would hereafter be silent until 8:30 a. m.

¶ At Oklahoma City University, President Walter Scott Athearn announced that the university would soon give academic credit for ping-pong, archery, skating, fraternity and sorority membership.

¶ At Harvard 300 students waited for an Italian fencing team to put in its appearance. Few hours later the fencers climbed off the train they had boarded in Manhattan, set off down Cincinnati’s streets to look for Harvard.

¶ Columbia opened a browsing room in its new $4,000,000 library. Textbooks are banned, smoking permitted. Said Librarian Jean Westphal: “We plan to collect a gentleman’s library and let the students use it just as the owner might.”

¶ University of Minnesota, for the first time in its 65 years, allowed its students to take or leave military training. Only other “land-grant college” which has abolished compulsory training is University of Wisconsin.

¶ New York University got its first Negro faculty member, Poet James Weldon Johnson.

¶ Cornell received a 620-acre wildwood near Ithaca for use as a field laboratory, accepting the donors’ provision that man’s hand shall never dredge or dam its streams, quarry its rocks, disturb the birth, growth, death and decay of any living thing within its boundaries.