New 'League for Reaction' Opposes Sex, Modern Politics at Yale Law

NEW HAVEN, Nov. 17--While Yale Law School students and deans fought this past week over new 2 a.m. parietal rules and a Conservative Club, a new group, called the "League for Reaction," has organized to propose that "the Opposite Sex be barred in perpetuity" from Yale Law dormitories.

The hyper-secret league has banded together to fight both liberal and conservative elements at the Law School, firmly basing its policies on 13th century principles--at least according to official proclamations by the group.

Actually, it is a facetious mocking of the frenzied controversy of the past month which has linked more conservative rules, i.e., replacement of Yale Law's traditional no-parietal rule system with a 2 a.m. deadline on weekends, to organization of a Conservative Club.

"Parlor Pinks"

Early last month, when the Conservative Club, a group of right-wing Law students, was first started, the Yale Daily News hailed its beginning editorially. It said, "It must have taken some bravery, some contempt of tradition, to raise the still, small voice of conservatism against the howling of the Law School parlor pinks, misty-eyed liberals, and left-wing political seers."

But students at the school reacted, charging the News of blaming former dean Wesley Sturges, by implication, for the "parlor pinks."

While conservatives and liberals ranted, and the News similarly refused to recant, the new dean's office abolished Yale's traditional non-parietal rule system--because of "excesses." In its place it set up the 2 a.m. deadline.

Edmund Burke Principles

Fury among students at the restriction and popular linking of conservatism in this case to the earlier "conservative" policy purportedly shown in the establishment of the Conservative Club led to the beginning of the League for Reaction. In a special manifesto last week, the League announced that since the student body "has recently been liberated from the terror of the left and their Libertine Consorts, and inasmuch as the policies of the prior administration have been deservedly repudiated by the forces of reason," a league would be formed, dedicated to the "abiding principles of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre."