YOU'RE IT

No nation has perhaps a more decided leaning toward that part of life which falls under the head of play than has America. So it is not surprising that such a thin thread of amusement as crossword puzzles could entangle the whole people for so many months. Nor it is quite queer that the faculty of an American institution of higher learning should like its own little sport. Examinations thus continue to hold full sway in the hearts of the learned clan and an odd kind of examination at that.

For the faculty, at least this one at Cambridge, has decided like other modernists to break the canous of the game that certain individuals might better display their originality. Hence the student body now faces not alone examinations which prove to the office that he has in a measure heeded the discourse and developed the hints of his instructor but those which show just how well he is able in torrid weather and with a mind fatigued from the monotony and length of the college year to do mental tricks for the edification of his faculty Examinations in English literature, for instance, are so arranged that the professor can eventually stand before some conference of wits and say. "I asked so many hundred supposedly intelligent college men what poems of the Nineteenth Century romanticists they liked and they could not tell me with any same reasons for so doing."

Now perhaps a final examination is a chance to help the instructor with his future after dinner speeches, perhaps a game which the instructor so enjoys that he must be allowed to play it at the risk of crippling the humor of the undergraduates. Yet it seems only fair under the circumstances to allow the professor to change parts occasionally with the student. The student need not always he "it". And when sometimes due to the heat and the hatred of always losing out in whimsy the student suggests something of the nature of a recent report on Browning and an ailment more chronic than literarily categorized it seems only fair that the professor admit defeat.