A few months ago an incident occurred at a Southern college that impressed me deeply. At one of a series of meetings which I was holding, a student rose and said that he wished to make confession to the student body. He had recently won the sophomore-junior debate, but wished to confess that he had gained it unfairly. He had overheard his opponent rehearsing his debate in an adjoining room, and although he stopped his ears and refused to listen, his room-mate took down the points. Afterward, the debater said, the temptation was so subtle that he took the notes, arranged his own debate accordingly, and won. “But,” he said with deep feeling, “I stole it, and I have come to plead the forgiveness of the student body.”
Very early the next morning a young man called at the house where I was being entertained, to tell me that he was the room-mate who had taken the notes mentioned in the confession. He, too, wished an opportunity to speak to the students. At the public meeting that evening, before three hundred college men, he rose and told of his all-night fight for character on the college campus. He described the humiliation which he saw confronting him if he should tell of his part in the dishonorable proceeding, and said:
“I was helped by a power beyond myself to make a clean breast of it. I am here to tell the students that I, rather than the man who spoke last night, should take the blame for stealing that debate.”
I do not remember ever having witnessed such deep feeling, or heard such applause in any assembly, as greeted that sturdy confession. It was a triumph of college honor and integrity, rooted in manhood, conscience, and religion.
Amateur College Theatricals
SOCIETY LIFE AMONG UNDERGRADUATES
But the supreme opportunity for the inculcation and employment of honesty is not reserved for examinations and public presentations; it also belongs to the complex social life of the colleges, which has become important. The club-book of an Eastern university, for example, records the existence at that institution of ninety different social organizations, the object of most of them being to bring men together sociably. Such intermingling is vital for college friendship. It is true, as former Dean Henry P. Wright of Yale has said, that, to a student, a friend is a “fellow whom you know all about, and still like,” and for that reason the social organizations which bring men together in an intimacy closer than is found anywhere else are indispensable aids in the formation of lasting friendships.
The social groupings of college life are also important because they give an opportunity for concrete and tangible success through student leadership. College society, in fact, has brought into being a restricted, but very real, world, with special laws and a kind of public opinion founded on student initiative and sentiment. Responsibility and leadership in college affairs have given many an undergraduate the initial stir to the qualities which make him successful in after life. These fraternal bodies, democratic, discriminatingly alert for the best men, and usually emphasizing worth rather than birth, are vital not only in the discovery of individuality, but also in their unique contribution to the corporate strength and unity of college life.