The main danger to the three historic universities of the east--Harvard, Yale and Princeton--is the danger of becoming inbred. Harvard, it would seem, definitely met that peril some years ago, when it shook off many of its Boston inhibitions and, through broadening its entrance examinations, made a clear bid for matriculants from high schools all over the country. Princeton, with its recent limitation of enrollment, may be just about to face the real danger of localization of influence. Yale, through calling to its presidency James Rowland Angell, a graduate of the University of Michigan and the former dean of the University of Chicago, may well be meeting, with an effective counterstroke, a peril of "eastern-ization" which may hardly be clear to its own trustees or alumni.

Yale has just been "reorganized." Unconsciously, the reorganizing was done by New York alumni, business men rather than scholars. The New York influence was paramount. The men who were forced to take this action by the inaction of the academic powers at New Haven were New Yorkers almost without exception. It seemed, all of a sudden, as if that "national" university had its main effectives in New York, just as Harvard had them in Boston. The thing is natural enough but it showed a real hint of parochialism which the New Yorkers themselves would have been the first to deplore.

The selection of a western-born, western-trained president should become a counterbalancing factor of the first importance. A man who has seen over the tops of the Alleghenies never forgets that vision. The Great Lakes, the Father of Waters, the Rockies and the Pacific are always in his view. Dean Angell, as Chicago still calls him, will undoubtedly make Yale's aspirations toward maintaining its national character more pregnant with reality than would a man whose life has been bounded by the valleys of the Connecticut and the Hudson.

Furthermore, there is a very decided blow at parochialism in the election of a non-Yale man as president of Yale. It does not follow that Dean Angell will be a better president because he is not a Yale graduate, but it is unquestionably true that this fact will do much to dispel any impression of inbred localization of view. There were Yale men before the university corporations who undeniably would have been passable or even good presidents. That the final choice fell upon a man without this sentimental plea to back him cannot but make the country feel that there is at New Haven a degree of broad-mindedness and courage which is the farthest possible remove from decadence. --CHICAGO TRIBUNE