Education: On the Shoulder

Members of Yale's ivied senior societies are required to stare stonily ahead whenever nonmembers ask them what their societies do. If the questioner persists,* members of such societies as Skull & Bones, Scroll & Key and Berzelius are expected to leave the room. Such behavior has sometimes led irreverent outsiders to suspect that the societies do nothing at all, except make mysteries of themselves, behind the bronze doors and windowless walls of their New Haven "tombs." But it has never prevented Yale juniors from hoping that they too will feel a hand fall on their shoulders at the traditional tap...

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