There has been some discussion recently as to the method of election to Phi Beta Kappa and it has been urged that the present and traditional method be changed in order to elect "promising" or "original" men whose marks are not good enough to earn the distinction. This proposed method was tried at Yale about twenty years ago and proved a complete failure. It was abandoned and the old order restored. There are enough extra-curriculum activities at Yale already and the rewards for success in them are sufficiently alluring so that it seems hardly advisable to ask Phi Beta Kappa to forsake its standards and be come also an extra-curriculum activity. . . . The election to Phi Beta Kappa means just one thing, no more and no less, and everyone knows what the key stands for. It means that in open competition with a fair field and no favor the key is given to those who have excelled in the studies of the curriculum, Phi Beta Kappa connotes scholarship and it would be changing both its policy and its standards to make it cannot anything else. In case men were selected for anything except scholarship it is a certainty that a man who is "prominent" would be chosen over a man who is obscure. . . . Phi Beta Kappa is aristocratic in intellect and democratic in competition. Should any other method of election be tried there would he some danger of favoritism. Wm. LXOX PHKIPS   in the Yale News.