The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Good of the College
I HAVE always been interested in the fact that the undergraduate who goes into any outside activity usually explains his action, even when it involves derelictions or irregularities, on the ground that he was induced to do so on account of his love for his Alma Mater and the good he could do the College.
I have spent hours this spring with a mentally lethargic junior who wishes to get off probation in order that he may compete in athletics, his sole purpose, so he alleges, being that he may bring honor and distinction to the college. Having loafed away his hours of intellectual grace, he feels that he could more than redeem himself if he were allowed to hurl the discus or do the one hundred yard dash. He feels that the institution is honored more by his physical achievements than by his mental. Ten seconds flat is more to be desired than a grade of 83 in Poly Science 4.
We are to have at the University within a few days hundreds of high school boys, most of whom are nearly ready to enter college. Whenever I have asked the purpose of bringing these young fellows here in the midst of term time, I have invariably got the reply that it was all for the college good. We are to show these visitors what college life is like; we are to attract them by giving them a fair idea of what we have to offer and what they will have to pay for it in time and thought and money if they come.
I wonder if we do it?
If the boy goes home convinced that college life is a mixture of May-pole dance and circus, of vaudeville and fox trot, of base ball and band, the college may not have profited as much as we might desire. For most students the college life is a serious life filled with difficult problems and hard work and duties and obligations which require the most of a man's time.
It is good to have the high school student here, I am sure, but if he goes home without carrying with him some impression of the serious life and the serious work of the successful student, he will have gained a wrong impression of college, and his coming will in no way contribute to the good of the college.
The responsibility is upon those who entertain him to show him a good time and yet to give him a fair idea of what a successful intellectual life in college really requires.
May