Cheating at Yale

"In the matter of classroom honesty, we make the conservative estimate that at least half the Yale undergraduates are at this moment guilty of breaking the college rules during the present exam period, the penalty for which is expulsion, the description--cheating."

Thus astoundingly did the News, undergraduate daily, editorialize on academic dishonesty at New Haven last week. Pleading for more faculty leniency toward campus cribbers, the editorial contended: "It is no longer a factor in determining a man's status in this community whether he be honest or not in this respect. It is even a source of public amusement to members of the faculty. . . .

"It is the charitable course for the authorities to withhold full measure of punishment and condemnation until the students as a community once more see things in the same light as themselves. How they will attain, this enlightenment remains to be discovered. ... A man who is convicted by the dean's office of cheating and leaves college under the stigma of that hideous word takes on an aspect of moral guilt which his companions ... do not of their own accord inflict. . . . Certainly a man's honor in the world is bitterly lost at 21."

Next day bustling Dean Clarence Whittlesey Mendell issued a statement saying that cheating is not prevalent at Yale, that the faculty certainly was not amused "at any feature of cheating in scholarship examinations," that "it has dealt with such charges severely and will continue to regard them as most serious."

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