Tap Day Proceedings Hurt Yale, Honor Society Juniors Complain

This afternoon starting promptly at 4:45 p.m. Yale's six secret senior socities, Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, Berzelius, Wolfshead, Book and Snake, and Elihu, will send their black-suited members out to tap 15 new men apiece from the junior class assembled in Branford Court.

Not since 1934 when the junior class boycotted the proceeding but not the societies has anti-Tap Day feeling been so strong. Criticism has centered around the open selection of juniors before their classmates, the complete ignorance by those tapped of what is involved, and the lack of cooperation among senior societies to work out a better solution.

Although President Seymour, a Bones man, has expressed his liking for a hands-off administration policy, other university higher-ups as well as many secret society men outside Bones have been concerned about the problem. When a dozen Torch and Aurelian Honor Society juniors drew up a statement last week deploring present Tap Day procedure and urging an inter-society council to work out a solution, one administration official sent copies of the statement to powerful society alumni representatives.

By yesterday four of the societies had replied to the effect that it was too late to do anything this year. However, junior class sentiment has crystalized enough as one member put it so that "many of us who do go in will work hard to change the situation for next year."