PAPER POLICIES

Clever satire is rare enough in these days to merit special recognition. In the article reprinted below, the New Student has used it to strike a sure deft blow against all that is illiberal and cheap in American college journalism. It is a fact that many college editors prostitute their intellectual standards and their literary skill to "exhorting application to study, denouncing unmoral students, people who do not cheer at basketball games, radicals and Freshmen Who Walk On The Grass." When modern education allows such inanity to flourish about its inmost shrine there is some reason for Mr. Upton Sinclair's rabidness.

The New Student has pointedly indicated what a college paper should not do; but to this negative definition there must be added one which is affirmative and constructive. In any such formulation Independence and Liberalism must stand as twin first principles. To make a college daily a mere enlarged version of the official bulletin board and a pleasantly written broadside for faculty opinions is to indict the mental energy and the moral courage of its editors. To make it a propaganda sheet for stand-pattists is to give up the heritage of youth: the mission of reform and reorganization.

In the policies of college newspapers there should be crystallized the highest ideals of the younger generation whose point of view it represents. A policy of boosting its own college or university for the sake of boosting, one of "selling" the educational opportunities offered by the faculty, one of warning Freshmen to wear their green caps is not one that is reflective of such high ideals. It is on a par with all that is mean and laughable on Main Street. It is upon the rejection of this sapless philosophy, upon the conviction that the rising generation has a right to the respect which its intellectual and moral qualities can call forth, and upon the principles of Independence and Liberalism that the CRIMSON has attempted to build its editorial policy.