Notabilia
The most important action of the University in its relation to the student body is the Sunday chapel regulation, that eleven o’clock non-sectarian Christian service and sermon is compulsory for all Yale College undergraduates and members of the common Freshman year. In this change of hour lies a change of issue. Before, the ten-minute ten o’clock service was a bit of tolerated hypocrisy to keep undergraduates in New Haven over the weekend. This compulsory attendance at Divine Worship is an intolerable religious offence.
Religion is a matter of individual opinion; compulsion is opposed to individuality. Compulsory religion then by our own inherited conception of that word is an impossibility. There can be no religion for an intelligent person in Woolsey Hall. To those who are not Christians it is intellectual persecution.
We are amused at the news that there was some discussion as to whether there should be plants or members of the faculty on the platform during the service. Plants seem to us the better choice; being more inanimate, they are less hypocritical.
Really it is astonishing how Yale can be as much of an institution of learning as it is, and still practice such stupidity in administration.
We should like to bring to our readers’ attention the following terse facts about Commons. Commons has a compulsory patronage amounting to approximately 900 men. It can count on a few hundred more men who are working their way through. After its seating capacity has thus been filled once, it need not (and does not) accommodate any more for that meal; it can therefore calculate with perfect accuracy, so that no food need be wasted. It requires cashin advance, or bills sent home; it has therefore no credit to carry on its books. At the present writing, it will allow no one to sign out: meals taken elsewhere are wasted moneyfor its customers. Its overhead is reduced to a minimum—far more so than that of any other eating house in college. And, added to this, it has the faculty to protect it.
Yet, what is happening? The charges for food are $9.00 per week, without rebate for cash. The service is slow whenever the hall is crowded. The food, while sometimes good, is by no means always so, and if maintained at the present standard would be intolerable as a year’s diet.
Considering the fact that, for nine hundred of its customers, it requires no table runners, thereby saving approximately $800 per week ($25,000 per year); there it is only $1.00 per week cheaper than some eating houses, and 50 cents cheaper than most; that its food is not as good as any of the others—considering these things, we suggest that an investigation be made. We are anxious to be fair in the matter and not judge too harshly a project which is as yet young. But the college seems to be of the opinion that considerable improvement must be shown by the Yale Dining Hall if it is to continue its somewhat shaky career.
Taking the same paternal stand as they have taken in the case of Commons, the faculty has decreed that the Liberal Club must ask “permission” before inviting speakers to address their meetings. Just what the Liberal Club will do about this, no one as yet knows. Certainly it conflicts with the very principles and ideals of that club, and represents a trend, on the part of the Yale faculty, to which the club is especially opposed.