It is significant that while Yale fights restrictions on its social life, students at Harvard Law are being urged to leave the books for some extra-curricular activity. The Harvard Law Record, the school's newspaper, recently complained:
". . . There is the inevitable alarm clock in the morning, two or three classes to attend, and then the rest of the day and evening to deal with. For most, this means study, study, and more study. Dormitory life has tended to break the monotony to some degree by affording numerous opportunities for bull sessions and the like. But this underlying theme is still generally the same. This type of life has its virtues, but there can be too much of a good thing. . ."
Actually, both schools have excellent extra-curricular activities. In addition to honorary groups like Harvard's Law Review and Yale's Law Journal, the number of organizations open to students is large indeed. But while at Harvard every organization operates independently, Yale has a Law School Student Association to which all students belong. The group puts out the Yearbook and handles all social, dormitory, dining hall, and athletic programs. There are even a law school jazz band, a choral society, and an annual Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.
Despite these activities, Yale is not the "backslapping" place it is often made out to be; nor is Harvard completely the coldly competitive school that Yale students condemn. There is, nonetheless, a difference in atmosphere which comes both from the difference in size of the student bodies and from the physical plants.
The more cosmopolitan nature of Harvard's student body also helps to produce the absence of group spirit. 303 colleges and 30 different nations were represented in last year's enrollment. Yale, one-third Harvard's size does well to attract its students from 152 colleges and 15 foreign countries. The myth about Yale's "policy approach" probably tends to appeal to a certain type of student--one interested in social, as well as legal, values. Harvard, it is claimed, is made to order for the individualist, the student who is interested in broadening his intellectual capacity through contact with a varied environments. Since Yale has somewhat de-emphasized its policy approach, however, and both schools offer loans or scholarships to about 23 percent of their total enrollments, the two student bodies are probably more alike now than formerly.
Grade pressure
Intellectual competition has been another standard comparison between Harvard and Yale. It was once claimed, with considerable truth, that Harvard flunked out a great number of students--sometimes nearly 30 percent of the first year class.
As a Harvard professor was supposed to have said on the first day of the first term: "Look to your right and look to your left: One of you won't be here next year." With the advent of Dean Griswold and a selective system of admissions, the high casualty rate has dropped to about 10 percent.
Yale, on the other hand, tried its best to separate the sheep from the goats before the first year, rather than after, It was not rare to have no failures take place over three years. Even now, as one student said, "It's pretty hard to flunk out of this place," although the actual number of failures varies from about five to ten in each class of about 150 over a three year period.
With pressure of final exams and numerical grades constantly before the Harvard student, he tends to look down on Yale's semi-annual marking system of "excellent-good-satisfactory-fail." For the Harvard student is convinced that he works harder than any other law student in the world.
If Harvard is more competitive after admission, Yale seems to have somewhat stiffer entrance standards. Harvard, which up to the post-