Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/203

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there are the church sociables which reach a considerable number of students, and there are also vaudeville and moving picture shows which at one time or another lure most of the students within their doors. Where the college is not situated upon a river or a lake there can be no skating, no tobogganing, no boating, and no bathing, excepting of a strictly domestic character. The undergraduate, who at the week-end, when his college work is done, is looking for somewhere to go with a young woman for pleasure or relaxation is practically always limited to dancing or to the local moving picture or vaudeville shows, and of these two opportunities the former presents the more refinement and the less evil and is most frequently taken advantage of.

Both of these forms of social pleasure seem to the unthoughtful onlooker indulged in to excess by the undergraduate body in general because he does not analyze the constituents of the crowd that make up the patrons of these social activities. He hears the rag-time music pounded out as he passes a dance-hall in the evening, he sees the crowds pouring out of a vaudeville play-house, and he concludes that students in general put in most of their time either at a vaudeville show or at a dance. He does not stop to caleulate that perhaps not five per cent. of the student body is dancing and not ten per cent. at the theater, nor does he conclude, as he should, as he walks through the student district and sees the student lodging houses lighted from cellar to garret that on almost any Friday or Saturday evening of the week at least seventy-five per cent. of the undergraduates are in their rooms after eight o'clock not engaged in