Two newspapers compete for the college leadership and the Northampton advertising market. "Scan" publishes twice weekly while the rival "Current," which went into business three years ago, comes out once a week. Students generally read both and favor the one their friends work for, "Current" runs an occasional feature but "Scan" gets more fresh news, has more original ideas, is better written, and certainly is more informative to the visiting reader than its competitor. Both papers ostensibly enjoy the competition but secretly wish their opponent would quit because there isn't enough advertising in the Smith community to feed two papers properly.

A humour magazine, The Campus Cat, comes out sporadically. Its best achievement to date was a parody of the article Life published a year ago on the co-ed college versus the woman's college. That story depicted life at a girl school as pretty grim by comparison and has since become infamous in Northampton.

Whether they can or they can't, every body at Smith seems to sing. The college supports nine singing groups and over 400 girls are in the them. There are two freshman choirs, a sophomore choir, the Glee Club, the Chamber Singers, the Chef Club, the Smithereens, the Octavians, and the Smiffenpoofs.

Which Aims Mater?

It was a song that generated the one major crisis between President Wright and the students, who generally love him. For a long time, Smith students had been fed up with their alma mater, which they justifiably find unsingable. Recently, the student body, after a long series of contests, proposed a new alma mater. The alumni, 27,000 strong and very active in Smith affairs, balked at this breach of tradition and Wright, who rightly looks upon them as a sort of a life-line declined to accept the new alma mater. The issue is still undecided.

Smith's finances are delicate. To make up for a piddling endowment, the smallest per capita of any girls school, it depends on tuition revenue and annual alumni gifts, which have to come to six figure sums, even after extra drives, like last year's for $7,000,000.

So far as students are concerned, the college should increase faculty salaries, provide more and bigger scholarships, and build a new scientific building, in that order, if it finds the money.

"Scan" suggested last October that the whole campus needs a going over. Noting that the Smith student had to bend to a bevy of rules that were non-existant on other campuses, the paper said editorially, "But a close breakdown reveals that it is our campus which is archaic, not the rules which are simply an adjustment to this condition. For instance smoking rules (Smith girls cannot smoke in their rooms), the paper said, exists because the dormitories aren't fireproof. Dormitory rules on returning are so rigid, it explained, because the campus is to discuss.

The rise and fall of the war scare has been an interesting political phenomenon to Smith but little else. Applications for the Class of 1955 are normal, and the college does not anticipate any faculty changes other than adjustments to demand by students on certain departments. There is, it is haltingly admitted, a slight upswing in the marriage frequency.

Meanwhile Smith starts its fourth quarter century. The atmosphere there may not be intellectually exciting, the girls often knit rather then take notes, but it is certainly intellectually alert, perhaps a little less isolation would be desirable, because after all, how far can a handful of Amherst men go around. But at least it makes sure that the cream of America's young ladies are not merely "admitted, on sufferance and made to fit as best they can," as Herbert Davis, Wright's predecessor, suggested women are in many a college