The Yale, troubled or in trouble, is likely to go to his master rather than a dean or psychiatrist. If he imports a date and signs up early enough the master will put her up in a spare bedroom; each master's family usually handles about 15 girls during the course of a big football weekend.
Dining in the Colleges is scarcely better, perhaps inferior to the Houses. But Colleges, because of their size, manage to smokescreen gastronomic deficiencies with graciousness. The dining rooms are smaller and proportionately quieter. Students queue up for their stew and ice cream inside the separate College Kitchens and succeed in making the dining halls look like desirable men's clubs rather than cafeterias. In fact, in pre-war days when food was good and served on plates by waitresses, the resemblance of Colleges to good men' clubs was one of their chief attractions to undergraduates.
I'm Sorry About the Plates
On special occasions, the Colleges make a big bid for gentility. A week ago, Calhoun replaced its tin trays with crockery, dressed its cafeteria staff in elegant black uniforms, and spectacularly dished out unspectacular food while a string trio played dinner music. A lady dispensing coffee obsessed with her duty to maintain a polished atmosphere, apologized for serving coffee cups on plates rather than saucers to students who usually balanced their coffee on trays. Dress for meals at Yale is not so consistently formal as it is in the Houses. Ties and coats are required for the main meal of the day but are usually optional otherwise.
Complaints about the food filter to the masters with about the same regularity as the Student Council gets them at Harvard, and they dwindle into the same obscurity. The Yalies' case for improved fare is even less sound, since they pay only $11 for a 21-meal ration.
Live-music dances are held in the College dining halls only once a term, since the demand is mostly satisfied by the fraternities. The nine fraternities, all relics of pre-1940 Yale line a curved "fraternity row" near the Colleges. During the week, the fraternity houses are used in desultory fashion by members who drops in for a quick beer. On weekends they open their doors to the whole student body and throw punches, dances, drinking parties, and jazz concerts. During better football weekends they are usually jammed. Some, like the Fence Club, try to avoid too uncontrolled a stampede and limit entrants.
Like the Houses, Colleges have developed reputations. Davenport, Pierson, Branford, and Calhoun are ellegedly the homes of the socially prominent the "white shoe men," and hence the most desirable. Berkeley, Jonathan Edwards, and Timothy Dwight fit into a middle caste. Silliman is the home of vigorous but not big time extroverts, and Trumbull and Saybrook are shunned as "black shoe" choices. These dis- tinctions are pretty spurious since a Council of Masters carefully plants a balance of high school men, prep school men, and scholarship students in each College. Fraternities don't rush until the sophomore year, when students have been assigned to a College, so the distribution of aristocracy in a College becomes somewhat a matter of chance.
The actual differences between the colleges are: architecture, location, size, and the convictions of the master. Three of the Colleges are part Georgian, while the rest are a mixed design called "Standard Oil Gothic." Most students prefer Gothic because it has intimate courtyards and is collegiate. But many state on their College application blank that they don't want to live in the heavy lightless buildings. Location near fraternity row or labs is often an influential factor. Size is a matter of taste, and convictions of the master are quite important in a system whose success is dependent on masters' ability and interest.
Like the Houses, the Colleges still have several unapproached goals. But no one at Yale will deny that they have provided roots for men who might otherwise have gotten irrevocably lost in the bigness of the university