A good many people besides the students at Princeton University would do well to ponder what President Hibben, in the course of the chapel address with which he opened the new term, told his boys about the "movies". He had warned them that, in full accord as he was with athletic interests and campus activities, they are not the chief reason for going to college. Then he picked out one "activity" as having little of his sympathy. "It is not really an activity," he said, and went on:

"It is rather a wholly passive form of amusement, an anaesthetic to the intellect. It is the habitual attendance at the moving picture halls night after night, week after week, throughout the year. It is certainly a waste of time, a sapping of your mental energies and turning them wholly aside from the sources of intellectual pleasures which have lasting and satisfying value."

So there are college students who go to the picture theatres "night after night, week after week, throughout the year"! Did President Hibben mean that the same students are subjected continuously to what he charitably applied no harsher term than anesthesia, or is his charge only that some students are present at every one of these shows? If only the second meaning was his, the situation is not so bad--not bad at all, perhaps. The other, if true, is nothing less than appalling. --The New York Times.