Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/76

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of their affairs; it may be wrong, but the responsibility is not upon them to stop it. Merchants or business firms who are implicated, most of them far away from the campus, of course have nothing to say on the subject, and those who are approached and who do not want to enter into such irregular negotiations, ordinarily content themselves with turning down the proposition and saying nothing. When there is a transfer of cash there is no record of it, no witnesses, no checks or drafts or papers of any kind to show that the undergraduate has profited. Bills are made out in regular order and checks covering the total amount of these bills are always forthcoming, so that on the surface the transaction seems entirely above board.

Notwithstanding these facts, however, I feel sure that careful supervision by the faculty of the business transactions of student activities would help materially to reduce if not in many cases to prevent undergraduate graft as it now exists. Much of the graft does not come from a definite transfer of cash from the representative of a business firm to an undergraduate manager, though there is considerable of this; it comes through thoughtlessness and carelessness on the part of the student. He collects money from various sources and gives no receipts; he pays bills and does not make a record of them; he does not keep separate the money which belongs to himself personally and that which belongs to the committee or the organization which he represents; he spends money as he is called on to do so, and by the end of a week or a month he has no remote idea how his accounts stand—how much money is his own and how