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From the Archives Somewhere
out in the cold, cruel world of crime is a thief with a keen appreciation
of art -- and a warm heart. The thief recently mailed an anonymous
package to the Yale Art Gallery. Inside was an Albrecht Durer engraving,
valued at $25,000, which was stolen from the gallery in 1969. The
print, entitled Adam and Eve, was dated 1504. The Yale campus
police and the FBI are investigating the benign mystery. The
prom, held this year on February 28, brought with it the usual flood
of telegrams and phone calls, the frenzied attempts to secure hotel
reservations, the worry about exchanging dances and where to go
afterwards, the fraternity affairs, and the cocktail parties. New
Haven's milkmen, forewarned by experience, armed themselves with
extra bottles of their product and had no trouble selling them on
the morning of March 1 to weary prom-trotters who, seated on the
Elm City's curbs, gratefully consumed the soothing liquid. In his
third pamphlet on the history of the Law School, Professor Frederick
C. Hicks has an account of the first attempts by women to take a
Yale law course. In 1872, a graduate of 1852, later a lieutenant
governor of Connecticut, wrote to the Law School asking whether
it was "far advanced enough to admit young women to your School."
He had a candidate and asked for a decision, though he hedged a
bit by adding: "In theory, I am in favor of their studying and practicing
law, provided they are ugly, but I should fear a handsome woman
before a jury." The Yale Corporation was startled at such an innovation.
The application seems to have been picked up with the President's
fireside tongs and gingerly "laid on the table." Skeptical
at first as to the practical usefulness of an "intelligence" test
of undergraduates, we confess that the statistics just compiled
by the department of psychology concerning Yale freshmen are extraordinarily
interesting. Fathers of Yale freshmen will naturally be pleased
when they hear that 85 per cent of the freshmen fell into the "very
superior" "A" class. The practical uses of these tests, if they
are carried out annually, will of course have to do with weeding
out the intellectually unfit. The tests will give the faculty a
clear notion of what every student may be expected to do and of
what students had better be dropped so as not to retard the rest
of the class. Yale is no place for laggards, or even those not mentally
intelligent enough to stand the pace that ought to be set for the
better men.
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Yale
Alumni Magazine, PO Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905. USA.
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