Flaming starkly in cold October air, the white fires of steel processing burn inexorably into the small hours of the morning. At the foot of South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a Lehigh Valley R. R. Co. freight train hisses steam for ten minutes and then continues along the shore of the Lehigh River. One of many steelworkers on the night shift of the Bethlehem Steel Company, a huge plant which stretches out of the city for almost five miles, lifts his goggles and sits on an iron pig to eat a supper of cold pork and white bread. For him, and thousands of others, the presence of gigantic Bethlehem Steel in a relatively small city is virtually unignorable.

About a half a mile from the industrial monolith, the campus of 2,500-student Lehigh University, stands above and apart from Bethlehem, on the steep slope of South Mountain.

Bar-stool regulars at a hotel near the railroad tracks occasionally like to tell a story about the Lehigh professor who set off to shop in North Bethlehem on a windy day, started across the bridge, turned around to light his pipe, and walked back to the campus.

But the town and the university generally have little to do with each other and it is difficult not to notice the absence of the type of stores which usually spring up around a university. Bethlehem is simply not a "college town."

But there are points of contact between the town and gown. Each night, students drink beer in the booths at the Tally-Ho, which are equipped with intimate green lanterns and a sign that reads "No Stags Or Loiterers." Behind the bar, English tavern scenes appear under glass panes on the wall and quart beer bottles are displayed on the liquor shelves. When a student ambles over from the shuffleboard machine to order a sloe gin fizz, the curiosity shown toward this beverage by the others at the bar may compel him to pass the drink around, but he is repaid by the management with a free glass of beer.

At the Office of the Dean of Students, it is pointed out that Bethlehem juveniles sometimes resent Lehigh freshmen who "come in and pick off the girls and take them to dances." But these youthful machinations are a minor matter, and it seems that the only apparent town-gown problem which concerns the University is that of the off-campus fraternities.

In September, the Bethlehem Globe-Times published a Letter to the Editor charging that fraternity men are nuisances to their neighbors. The letterwriter stated that the University should build "a huge pit" on the campus, and continued: "Here these animals can congregate and act like the dunces they apparently crave to be."

But last Friday Brown and White, the Lehigh student newspaper, came up with an interesting answer to this letterwriter. After conducting a thorough survey, the paper found that 75 per cent of Bethlehem residents whose homes are contiguous to Lehigh fraternities have no serious complaints against them, and that many even prefer to have "the Greeks" as neighbors. Moreover, the University is giving heavy financial support to an on-campus building program which will eventually bring all the houses up to South Mountain.

On the Mountain, below 15 other fraternity houses, the University occupies 25 buildings. Academically, Lehigh is three colleges: Engineering, Arts and Sciences, and Business Administration. The majority of Lehigh students are in the Engineering College, the reminder equally divided between Arts and Business. Forty per cent of the Faculty teach in the College of Arts and Sciences, and certain very significant points of relation exist between Arts and Engineering.

From its inception in 1865, Lehigh had to face the problem of resolving conflicts between the educational values attached to arts, and to engineering. Founder Asa Packer (who is described in the catalogue as "one of America's pioneer captains of industry") had wanted to build a technical institution but was convinced by "educational advisers" to widen the scope of his new school. Although an old edition of the Oxford Directory might call engineering a trade, Herbert Hoover would say it is a profession, and Lehigh educators have consistently agreed with Hoover.

Lehigh handles the problem of educating the engineer in the arts according to the philosophy of the American Society for Engineering Education, a group which can only be criticized for taking its own suggestions too seriously. It is assumed that the engineering student can give only a limited amount of time to non-technical subjects, and will derive the most return from highly integrated humanities and social sciences courses. Thus the general education program follows a nationally familiar pattern: freshman English, followed by courses each year in contemporary civilization, Great Books, History of Western Thought, or Practical Economics and Sociology. The aim of these courses, according to one dean, is "to develop conceptual sophistication."

The most straightforward appraisal of Lehigh's liberal arts program for technical students probably can be credited to Loyal Vivian Bewley, Dean of the College of Engineering. He states: "The general studies program doesn't make them cultured, but it does give them a good smattering...An engineer is an engineer and if you try to make him everything else in the catalogue, you end up with nothing."

Another dean says that "every college has to fight to destroy false public images" and regrets that the Lehigh football team is known in its conference as the "Engineers."

His remarks are valid insofar as they point to a problem which has bothered Lehigh for many years. The university on South Mountain is not a stunted backwoods M.I.T., nor is it an undergraduate institute of technology which entertains the ease of a few unmotivated arts students. This is sometimes forgotten.

About five years ago, the continued existence of the College of Arts and Sciences was almost a moot question. Enrollment was continuing to skid badly, and it was rumored that a few of the faculty were seriously thinking of walking away from the campus. A group of "Young Turks" was vitally interested in taking positive steps to examine and correct the situation, and the older liberal arts men, among them the retiring dean, turned the task over to them.