THE GAIETY OF UNDERGRADUATES
Traditions are closely connected with college gaiety, and gaiety forms a real part of the comprehensive life of the American student. “Cheerfulness,” says Arnold Bennett, “is a most precious attainment.” The undergraduate cultivates it as an art, puts worry behind him, and faces the world with a laugh.
About his gaiety there is a kind of humorous bravado. He likes to defy the lightning. An old graduate of Princeton relates how, in 1857, when the paper called The Rake, because of its daring criticisms, had brought its editors under the ban of suspension by the faculty, the editors injected fun into the dismal situation by printing the statement, “We have authority for supposing that even the faculty do not coöperate as heartily with our undertaking as they could and should.”
At the University of Michigan a professor, lecturing on electricity, wished to show that the fur of a cat is raised by an electrical current. He asked one day, “Will some student bring a cat to-morrow, in order that we may show this experiment?” The next day every one of the forty students entered the lecture-room with a cat under his arm!
Mechanical laws seem never to baffle the collegian in search of gaiety. Indeed, when one studies some of the mysterious happenings on and about the college campus, one ceases to wonder at the mechanical triumphs of the Egyptians. At one college which I visited, the stilly night was disturbed by half a hundred students who, with riotous yells, ran a two-horse wagon back and forth on an upper story of a college dormitory, to which place they had succeeded in hoisting it. This occurred at midnight, for the delectation of three hundred students and members of the faculty who were sleeping below. Next day the college paper declared that the president of the institution had been seen at his bedside supplicating against earthquakes and thunderbolts.
I once visited a small college where the chapel exercises were abruptly ended because six or eight barn-yard fowl had been placed inside the pipe-organ. As several hundred students marched into the chapel, the old German professor, who was deaf, began to play the organ. The commingled sounds that issued from that instrument when the levers began to work were described as extraordinary.
Much of the enduring loyalty of college men clings about the memories of such events. A college president once said to me that some of the most important gifts to his institution came from men who remembered college fun and “idlesse” long after time had blotted out the serious impressions of the classroom. As one apostle of the easy-going side of student days has said:
“There is some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all around about you, and for the trouble of looking that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.”
Still, there is the duty of drawing a distinct line between college fun and fundamental decency and good order. When this line is crossed, all the authority of the faculty and, if necessary, the laws of the land should be brought to bear upon the offenders. There should be no dallying with undergraduate law-breakers, no special exemptions for students. Reprehensible and even criminal acts have been committed by college men in the last few years which called for severer punishment than seemingly they received. It is no kindness to the undergraduate to overlook acts of dishonesty, ruthless destruction of property, or dissipated license. Respect for property and conventions should be impressed upon a boy before he reaches college age. It is because lawlessness has been tolerated by parents in the home, as well as by over-lenient masters at boarding-school, that we read continually of offenses against common sense and respectability, committed by persons of supposed cultivation. Few things are more needed in American life to-day than strengthening the respect for discipline and lawful authority.