The honorary degree which Yale will confer on President Roosevelt will attract more attention than any other of the hundreds which the universities and colleges of the country, as a whole, will confer within the next few days. Usually such degrees are not announced in advance; since they are conferred in person and very rarely "in absentia,'" the recipient is cautioned to regard the news of the honor about to fall upon him as confidential. It is not yet known to whom will fall the added distinction of receiving their degrees on the same platform with the President. In his case the publicity which attends his movements made the advance announcement necessary.

Already the ness that Yale will make the President a doctor of laws has led to some discussion as to how far he and his policies are actually indorsed by the general body of Yale men. While he made "the forgotten man," of Professor William G. Sumner, one of Yale's greatest teachers, a figure in the campaign of 1932, the New Haven Journal-Courier suggests that "Mr. Roosevelt has used some of Sumner's phrases, to be sure, but only by a cruel mayhem on their context." That is undoubtedly true; the new deal runs counter to much of the economics that Sumner taught, also to much that Arthur T. Hadley taught, both as a professor of economics and after he because Yale's president.

But both Sumner and Hadley are dead, and times and conditions have changed. The point is, if there is any value in the honorary degree as an encouragement to independent thinking and courageous public service, that it ought not to be conditioned, even in far less conspicuous cases than that of the President, upon the indorsement of specific views and conclusions. One suspects that limitation of that character -- domination by hide bound and ultraconservative elements -- has in the past prevented Yale and other institutions from awarding honorary degrees which would have done them great credit and which as the years have passed would now be looked back upon with universal satisfaction, but the opportunity for which is gone because men of courage and vision have died before they received the recognition they deserved. --Springfield Republican.