Crazy Over Houses Houses! Houses!

Lewis Mumford's statement in the interview published in yesterday's Sun that the "colleges are spending enormous sums on buildings and nothing on men" is exceedingly important in the ever-raging controversy that surrounds educational trends.

His sentiments are precisely those that are held by every intelligent, liberal-minded man who fears for the disappearance of these vital elements of university life that are more and more being submerged by the current craze for externals.

What we are doing at Cornell is exactly what they are doing at Harvard. Yale, and a great many other leading universities. We are building beautiful architectural specimens in which to house our students. We are worrying about gymnasiums and dormitories, fraternity houses and social halls. And meanwhile our departments, especially those in the Arts College, are deteriorating in cultural qualities.

If benevolent alumni could be persuaded to give a few hundred thousand to endow badly needed chairs at Ithaca, we should have "a handful of thinking men" who might do something to make the various departments at Cornell foremost in their fields.

It is indeed excellent to be able to boast the best university chemistry laboratory, the most formidable Drill Hall, and even the finest set of dormitories (if indeed such a boast is Cornell's), but what is happening to the other side of the picture.

It is by no means our intention to criticize the administration's policy of building expansion. The new Law School will undoubtedly be one of the greatest additions to the University in recent years. And the other buildings that have recently been erected and are still going up have been badly needed for a long time. The tendency here, however, is to overlook the importance of getting and keeping at Cornell professors who will, by the force of their personalities and scholarship, inculcate in their students a real semblance of the sort of learning that is being neglected, more and more, now that the chief business seems to be preparing undergraduates for highly specialized fields of endeavor.

Are we to continue to lose men who are acknowledged authorities on their subjects because we haven't the salaries to keep them? --Cornell Sun.