Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/160

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nence and trust in one of the largest corporations of the Middle West. He confessed to me that he had had little education and training as a boy before he became a part of the business. What he knew he had acquired through practical experience, through hard knocks, through willingness to work, and what he had accomplished he had done without influence or pull.

"How does it come, then," I asked, "that you have been placed in so prominent a position at so early an age?" for he was still a comparatively young man.

"There is but one reason," he replied. "I have a single virtue. I proved myself to the company by many tests to be absolutely honest. It is that quality which gave me my position, and it is through that quality that I hold it." I told the story later to a cribber.

There is one solution, it seems to me, to the difficulty, one cure for the evil of cribbing,—the creation of a strong healthy student sentiment against it. Rigid discipline will help, but it will not wipe out the evil. Whatever discipline is enforced must appeal to the good judgment of the better class of students as just. Whenever in the minds of the body of undergraduates the character of the discipline enforced by the faculty seems cruel or over-severe, one of the main purposes of discipline, the deterring of misdeeds, is lost; for the student who is thought to have been disciplined too severely becomes at once, in the minds of his friends and companions, a martyr to be sympathized with and pitied and made a hero of. When such a condition arises the evil is rather likely to increase than to lessen.