The Yale Daily News

Ingredients of the Old School Rivalry, although little more than intermural nose-pulling, have always been the high jinks among Ivy League newspapers. With unrhythmic regularity the dailies have ground out odd-man assortments of parodies and away-from-home editions. We have exchanged good-natured tweaks with Princeton, for example, and both staffs parted in light spirits, printed conflicting stories of the incidents, and laughed it over. The Yale Daily News is another story.

When the Oldest College Daily announced last Spring that it would suspend Saturday publication, we sympathized, suggested that "neither God nor Country operates on a five day week," and published a series of CRIMSON New Haven editions. The OCD did not take the hint, and declared they would print only on Saturdays when there were Big Doings. Since then the News, except for continually running fake pictures of Crime editors, has barely done enough to justify publishing five days of the week. In a number of articles they have, in effect, invited us to analyse them in return, a pompous task we feel incapable of doing, naturally, without mounting the oratorial pedestal.

The problem is this: at Yale, hardly anybody reads the News anymore. Lots of students glance through the pictures, notices, and sports scores. But for those who might like some serious reading there is little more than disappointment. This is unfortunate, for the News was an interesting paper in its day. Even now, some of its departments are first rate: the photographs show imagination and reproduce beautifully; the sports writers cover Eli's heroes assiduously from the pre-season meeting down to the last sweatstock laundering. Otherwise, the News is engulfed in mediocrity.

The front page shows this the most. The test of the energy and ambition of any college newspaper is in its front page right-hand column: the lead story. To fill that column the easy way, a paper has merely to act as a conduit for the University News Office. Indeed, at some universities, (though not Yale), Administration censorship makes this the only way. The hard way is to dig up news independently, news which may embarrass university departments or student organizations, but for that very reason serves to dissuade these groups from making mistakes or acting arbitrarily. In the world beyond the ivied walls, this is the way free newspapers must operate.

The News has taken the easy way out. Running through the first 49 papers of the fall term, we find that 16 of the lead stories concern sports, five reported speeches, and ten were of the type born in the University News Office. Seven more were routine coverage of the floods and New Haven politics. Of the nine which showed even a glimmer of reportorial originality, most were concerned with such earth-shaking events as the apprehension of a pilferer in the locker room, or the towing away of large numbers of automobiles by the police. In fact, out of 49 opportunities for constructive reporting, the News scored in only two issues, both stories that Yale was charging student organizations rent for office space in opposition to the policies of other Ivy-League universities.

To camouflage the lack of interesting news, the Oldest College Daily has attempted to rouse its slumbering readers with large gobs of sex. The Rhinegold Girls, Esther Williams, Shubert Theatre ingenues, and even Eva Marie Saint have paraded through the front page colunms in various degrees of exposure. Almost everyone enjoys ribald whimsy, but the News handles its sex with heavy hands, as in the ludicrous interview with a breasty wench named Meg Myles, whom the OCD reporter referred to as "Hollywood starlet and two of America's rising beauties."

"Hypermamiferous," Meg Myles was quoted as saying, "that's what I am, hypermamiferous. It means having big . . . well, you know."

On the editorial page, which is presided over by the Chairman of the News, a greater expenditure of energy has, unfortunately, produced almost as tepid results. The Great Tradition of News editorials has been to arouse controversy that will lead to fruitful exchange of opinion between the Chairman and student letter writers. The story is often told of the professor who strode angrily into class one day while archconservative William F. Buckley was News chairman.

"Did you see the editorial in the News today,?" he stormed at his class, "it made me sick."

But Buckley's editorials were read, and incidentally furnished the germ of a healthy conservative philosophy, now appearing on the national scene. This fall, however, the Chairman of the News has published such stirring calls to battle as "Welcome Parents", "Blood Needed," and "A Word On Cheering" (the last begins, "Cheering at Yale has gone to pot.")

There has been editorial attack on Yale's "fraternities," but the News spent much of its space explaining why it, too, served liquor to minors. Comments on national and international affairs appear infrequently, and are of the crudest armchair variety. One of them, written after the Eisenhower break in the Stock Market, predicted an oncoming United States depression with the profound conclusion that "It need not be pointed out that if this nation suffered another depression of serious proportions, it would lose considerable influence in its effort to woo the world to capitalism instead of communism."

In place of controversy, the editorialists have substituted philosophical tomes which read as if they were written for a blue book. Much as it might tingle the cars of a grader, the editorial page is hardly the place for longwinded attempts beginning: "From Machiavelli's Italy to Hitler's Germany, double standards of morality have permitted national leaders to commit acts completely contradictory to their religious and moral beliefs." Or, "The highest role of the artist in society is to portray its values. . ."

Before stepping down from that oratorical pedestal, it is only just to say that, despite the puerileness of the OCD's makeup and the sterility of its writing, there is nothing organically wrong with the News that a few conscientious and talented younger editors couldn't cure.