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.
COLLEGE MEN’S HONOR
Such abuses of liberty, as well as nearly all other college delinquencies, can be largely prevented by a consistent appeal to the undergraduate’s sense of honor. Recently I asked the president of a North Carolina college what he regarded as the chief characteristic of American students. He replied promptly, “College honor.” At Princeton, at the University of Virginia, at Amherst, and at many other institutions, the honor system in examinations arranged and managed by students, represents the deliberate intention of the undergraduates to do the square thing. These laws, which the students voluntarily impose upon themselves, are enforced more vigorously than the rules of the faculty.
A few years ago I visited a university at a time when the entire undergraduate body was deeply stirred over a matter that involved college honor. A senior of high standing socially and intellectually, the son of a prominent family, high in popular favor, was overheard to use disrespectful language to his landlady. The senior was summoned before the student committee having charge of undergraduate affairs, confronted with the charges, allowed to make answer, and, being found guilty, was asked to leave the institution. His family and friends, incensed by this demand, which seemed to them both harsh and unjust, appealed to the faculty for redress. The chairman of the faculty replied that the matter was entirely in the hands of the students. Application was then made to the student committee to present the young man’s side of the question to the whole college. The student council readily acceded to this request, saying that they were perfectly willing to consider the charges more at length, as their only desire was to be absolutely just. When he went up for a new trial the young man’s family engaged a lawyer. The student body also engaged counsel. The trial was held in one of the largest halls in the university town, and virtually the whole student body sat through the evening and far into the morning listening to the presentations of both sides. A judge who told me of the incident said that during those hours, looking into those student faces, he did not remember seeing any man change his expression, but that every one sat in the attitude of seeking only the truth. The jury, which was chosen from the faculty and from impartial men in the town, found that the young man had actually used the words attributed to him, and therefore pronounced him guilty of the charge.