At Good Old Siwash

by George Fitch

How a professor can go through an assorted collection of brain stufferies, get so many college degrees that his name looks like Halley's Comet with an alphabet tail, and then teach college students for forty years without even taking one of them apart to find out what he is made of, beats my time! That's a college professor for you, right through. He thinks of a college student only as something to teach—whereas, of all the nineteen hundred and eighty-seven things a college student is, that is about the least important to his notion. A boy might be a cipher message on an early Assyrian brick and stand a far better chance of being understood by his professor.

A college Faculty is a collection of brains tied together by a firm resolve—said resolve being to find out what miscreant put plaster of Paris in the keyhole of the president's door. It is a wet blanket on a joyous life; it is a sort of penance provided by Providence to make a college boy forget that he's glad he's alive. It's a hypodermic syringe through which the student is supposed to get wisdom. It takes the place of conscience after you've been destroying college property. When I sum it all up it seems to me that a college Faculty is a dark, rainy cloud in the middle of a beautiful May morning—at least that's the way the Faculty looked to me when I was a humble seeker after the truth in Siwash College.

The Faculty was to boys in Siwash what indigestion is to a jolly good fellow in the restaurant district. It was always either among us or getting ready to land on us. Our Faculty had thirty-two profs and thirty-three pairs of spectacles. It also had two good average heads of hair and considerable whiskers. It could figure out a perihelion or a Latin bill-of-fare in a minute, but you ought to hear it stutter when it tried to map out the daily relaxations of a college full of husky young hurricanes, who had come to school to learn what life looks like from the inside. Fairy tales in the German and tea and wafers with quotations looked like a jolly good time to the Faculty; and it couldn't understand why some of us liked to put gunpowder in the tea.

Now don't understand me to say that there isn't anything good about a college professor. Bless you, no! There's a lot of it. A Faculty is a lot of college profs in a state of inflammation, but individually most of the Siwash profs were nearly human at times. I look back at some of them now with awe. They really knew a lot. They knew so much that most of them are there yet; and I go back and look at them with a good deal more respect than I used to have. I'll tell you it fills a chap with awe to see a man teaching along for twenty years at eighteen hundred dollars per, and raising children, and buying books, and going off to Europe now and then on that princely sum—and coming through it all happy and content with life. I go around them nowadays with my hat off and try to persuade them that if it wasn't for my sprained arm I could quote Latin almost as well as the stone dog in front of Prexy's house.

And some of them are bully good fellows, too. Nowadays they take me into their studies at Commencement and give me good cigars, making sure first that there are no undergraduates around. Why, one of the profs I worried the most, when I was a cross between a Sophomore and a spotted hyena, is as glad to see me nowadays as though I owed him money. He runs a little automobile, and I hope I may get laid out in the subway if I haven't heard him cuss in real United States when the clutch slipped. And he was the chap who used to pick out the passages in Livy that had inflammatory rheumatism and make me recite on them, and who always told me that a student who smoked cigarettes would be making a wise business move if he brought his hat to recitation and left the less important part of his head at home.

But, as I was saying, the Faculty at Siwash, like all other Faculties, didn't know its place. It wasn't satisfied with teaching us Greek and Latin and Evidences of Christianity and tall-brow twaddle of all sorts. It had to butt into our athletics and regulate them. Did you ever see a farmer regulate a weed patch with a hoe? You know how unhealthy it is for the weeds. Well, that was the way the Faculty regulated our athletics. It didn't believe in athletics anyway. They were too interesting. They might not have been sinful, but they were not literary and they were uneconomic. Of course all the professors admitted that good outdoor exercise was healthy for college boys, but most of them believed that you ought to get it in the college library out of Nature books. And so the way they went at the real athletics, to keep them pure and healthful, almost drove us into the violent ward.

Those were the days at Siwash when our football team could start out for a pleasant stroll through any teams in our section and wonder after it had passed the goal line, why those undersized fellows had been jogging their elbows all the way down the field. That was the kind of a team we built up every fall; and it wasn't half so much trouble to keep other teams from beating it as it was to keep the Faculty from blowing it to pieces with non-eligibility notices. There was something diabolical about that Faculty when it was wrestling with the athletic problem. It wasn't human. It was like Mount Etna. You never could tell just when it would stop being lovely and quiet, and scatter ruin all over the vicinity.

Its idea of regulating athletics at Siwash was to think up excuses for flunking every man who weighed over one hundred and fifty-five and could have his toes stepped on without saying "Ouch!" And it never got the excuses thought up until the night before the most important games. The Faculty pretended to be as bland and innocent as Mary's lamb, but no one can ever tell me it didn't know what it was about. Men have to have real genius to think up the things it did. You couldn't do it accidentally. When a Siwash Faculty could moon along happily all fall until twenty-four hours before the Kiowa game and then discover with regret that our two-hundred-and-twenty-pound center had misspelled three words in an examination paper the year before; that our two-hundred-pound backs didn't put enough rear-end collisions into their words when they read French; and that Ole Skjarsen read Latin with a Norwegian accent and was therefore too big an ignoramus to play football, I decline to be fooled. I never was fooled. Neither was Keg Rearick. But that is hurdling about three chapters.

Honestly, we used to spend one day out of six building up our football team and the other five defending it from the Faculty. It positively hungered for a bite out of the line-up. It had us helpless. If we didn't like the way it ran things we could take our happy young college life up by the roots and transplant it to some other school, where the football team moved around the field like a parade. Theoretically the Faculty could sit around and take our best players off the team, as fast as we developed them, for non-attention to studies. But, as a matter of fact, it wasn't an easy matter. It beats all how early in the morning you have to get up to get ahead of college lads who have got it into their heads that the world will gum up on its axle and stop dead still if their innocent little pleasures are interfered with.

I remember the fall that the Faculty decided Miller couldn't play because he hadn't attended chapel quite persistently enough the spring before. Miller was our center and as important to the team that year as the mainspring of a watch. The ponderous brain trust that sat on this case didn't decide it until the day before the big game with Muggledorfer; then they practically ruled that he would have to go back to last spring and take his chapel all over again. It took us all night to sidestep that outrage, but we did it. The next morning an indignation committee of fifty students met the Faculty and presented alibis that were invincible. It was demonstrated by a cloud of witnesses that Miller had been absent nine times hand-running because he had been sitting up nights with a sick chum. The Faculty was inexperienced that year and let him play; but, when it found out the next day by consulting the records that the chum had attended chapel every one of those nine mornings, it got more particular than ever and its heart seemed to harden.