Not so long ago Yale students are their food like Harvard men, from divided trays; now they use gleaming blue and white china emblazoned with college shields. Until this summer, one of the old freshman dorms was popularly known as "Dirty Durfec"; now a thorough remodeling has made it one of the most popular freshman halls.

These traces of the "gracious living" of the late thirties are two of the most obvious indications that Yale is well on the path to what the New Haven university's administrators like to call "post-war normalcy."

Yet, Yale's policy is not as simple as the innocent sounding 'normalcy" implies. President A. Whitney Griswold's alternative to expansion seems rather an attempt to make Yale approximate a large scale modern Athens: a place where a select group of gifted and highly motivated students will learn from the best teachers. An essential part of this will be a pleasant and comfortable environment, superficially known as "gracious living."

No one has a very exact definition of this "normalcy," but almost everyone at Yale agrees that it has to be attained if the University is to save itself from the dilution of educational standards they forsee at universities that try to absorb huge future increases in college students.

At this early stage in the process, only the beginnings of the proposed pleasant, though functional, environment are clearly visible. Yale wants its students to have privacy for study and this means a maximum of one desk to a room. "Any other system fails to consider the garrulous nature of American undergraduates," says Thomas C. Mendenhall, Master of Berkely College. Study also requires adequate library facilities.

The most ambitious steps toward these goals, still in the planning stage, are a new resident college and an undergraduate library somewhat like Harvard's Lamont Library. The most probable location for the new college has already been purchased while a plan for a new library will soon be submitted to the administration by University librarians.

Yale Buys Town School

This fall, Yale bought property which three New Haven high schools now occupy adjacent to the Eli campus. Under its contract with the city, the university must wait until New Haven builds new high schools before it can take over the buildings and land. This will not be before the summer of 1957 and Yale has made no definite statements concerning the use of this land. However, about the only other large and empty areas adjacent to the campus and suitable for a new college are the Grove Street Cemetery and the New Haven Green; both seem unlikely choices.

The contract with the city was briefily threatened when the Republican candidate for mayor, Phillip E. Mancini, accused incumbent mayor Richard C. Lee, former director of the Yale news office, of making a secret deal with the university at the expense of the city. Lee, however, defeated Mancini by the largst vote majority in New Haven political history in this month's elections.

The report to the University Council on a new undergraduate library will recommend its construction at High and Wall streets, just across from Sterling Memorial Library. "Present library facilities are over-crowded and it's no secret that we badly need new space," University Librarian Dabb says. A committee has been studying Lamont Library for about a year as a model for parts of the Yale library's operation.

Much has already come and will come before the proposed new college and library, however. The first step toward the goal of one desk per room was the reduction of incoming freshman classes from 1,150 to 1,000 despite greatly increased applications for admissions. This was much less than the veteran swelled post-war peak of some 7,500 college students, but resident fraternity houses had disappeared during the war to leave the colleges and freshman dorms still over-crowded when the veterans left.

"We can't contract further under such great pressure to expand, so we have to build and remodel," says Norman S. Buck, Master of Branford College and Associate Provost of the University. Although a new college is still in the future, the freshman problem has already largely been taken care of.

Renovations were badly needed in the old freshman dorms anyway, so administrators combined "deferred maintenance" with the partitioning of large rooms into small ones to reach the ideal of one desk per room.

This is also the first year freshman do not have to worry about finding special electrical appliances as the switch from DC to AC current came this summer. The three year remodeling project is expected to draw to an end in another year.

New Medical School Dormitory