Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/101

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ORGANIZATION OF A STATE UNIVERSITY
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tion to infra-university physical education, and especially outdoor sports. It is likely that this should be a faculty-student cooperative committee.

2. On social affairs and social life: One of the constant complaints made in the average university is with reference to the lack of interest on the part of the faculty in the social life of the student body; and it is a more or less disgraceful fact that a very large number of the university students and faculty as well have practically no part in what is ordinarily called the social life. A committee of cordially cooperating faculty-student membership could do very much towards minimizing some of the excesses of social life on the part of some and the unhealthy lack of social life on the part of others. Perhaps the most important part of the committee's work might be the interesting of faculty members in the actualities of the social life of the school. There should be no attempt, of course, to dictate in any sense at all, but only to cooperate in securing to every individual some normal exercise of his social instincts.

3. On student activities: Every student should take part in some non-scholastic enterprise about the school. At the present time some students have too many of these enterprises in their control, while others are probably just to that extent prevented from having any real share in the out-of-school interests of the student body. Such a committee, of course, could make itself officiously offensive, but a committee of teachers who had not enough tact to be helpful in matters of this kind certainly would be made up of men and women who have no business to be teaching. Such a committee should have a large membership and should be organized to help promote all phases of legitimate "student activity" in the university.

4. On religious and moral problems in the university: Our state universities are lacking in their provision for the larger religious and moral enterprises. Officially, perhaps, little can be done by the school; but a volunteer committee, working with student organizations, can do very much to save those organizations from becoming insipid and to secure to the student body some actual participation in the world's treasures of religious culture, and to help them find their vital relationship to the real work of the world along religious and moral lines.

5. On relationships with the state at large: Here is, perhaps, one of the most important opportunities for such volunteer committee work. The committee should be made up of a strong group of men and women who are vitally interested in the problems of the state. The committee might well be a sort of critical directorate and moral support for the university extension work. It should feel perfectly free to criticize that extension work when it does not seem to be getting proper results in its plans for the state; and it should not hesitate to present