Outside & Inside

The country was given a good look at a fair cross-section of its college co-eds last week. For the first time since 1933, a beauty contest was held among the Big Ten universities of the Midwest. Purdue, Michigan and Indiana refused to let their girls participate, but scouts from Northwestern helped pick, and the promoters of

Northwestern's Charity Ball in Chicago judged, seven "queens" from seven big campuses (see cut). They gave the prize to the most patrician-looking girl of the lot--dark-haired, demure Joyce Kerr, 21, daughter of a drygoods merchant in Elmore, Minn. Queen Joyce is a junior at the University of Minnesota.

Besides a look at some typical co-ed faces, the country was last week afforded a look into contemporary undergraduate heads, through the eyes of young Elizabeth Eldridge, of San Antonio, Tex. Miss Eldridge is national dean of Alpha Epsilon Phi Sorority. AEf is for Jewish girls only, but Dean Eldridge felt qualified by her travels to many campuses throughout the land to write in the Saturday Evening Post:

"In the last few years, magazines have been full of articles about the New Seriousness in the American college. The predominant tone among undergraduates now, you read, is marked by thoughtful interest in contemporary social and economic problems. Intriguing possibility, but. . . .

"All large campuses have little groups of earnest and not badly informed serious thinkers bewildering themselves about the modern world, but their influence on the tone of the campus is as narrow as that of the local Phi Beta Kappa. . . . There is hardly a trace of it in the Mississippi Valley. . . .

"You can't get all excited about contemporary problems unless you know what they are. . . . Last fall a very fair proportion of the students I talked to in a big state university had no idea there was a war going on in Spain. . . . Two years ago . . " I found plenty of students who had never heard of the Abyssinian War. . . ."

Only permanent change Miss Eldridge could find was in collegiate slang.

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