They have a daily paper, the “Cardinal,” and I discovered that here also the students are getting a complete training in the ways of the outside world. The “Cardinal” is supposed to be the publication of the student body, and those who edit it are supposed to do the work for the honor and the experience. But large sums are taken in and no one knows where they go. There was an investigation by the student senate, and the findings were kept secret. One student on the board persisted in asking questions, and he was expelled; he ran for re-election, and on the very day of election the paper published an elaborate attack upon his integrity; his answer was published the day after his defeat! The paper refused publication of another student’s article, demanding to know the circulation of the paper and the salaries paid to the editors, if any. It developed that the business manager had borrowed three hundred and seventy dollars from the paper without security, and that there had been other such loans not specified. A pretty complete training for capitalist journalism and politics!
Here, as everywhere, it is the fraternity and sorority groups which run the student body. They bring from their wealthy homes the usual reactionary opinions; and the last reactionary governor, Philipp by name, laid down the ideal of a university a couple of years ago—the mothers and fathers of Wisconsin might rest assured that their university would send their sons and daughters home with the same ideas they had when they came! I picked up a couple of issues of the “Wisconsin Octopus,” a humorous monthly published by the student body. Here is a little sketch, which might have been taken from the “Saturday Evening Post,” showing a long-haired student in spectacles, listening enraptured to a frantic Bolshevist orator on a soap-box, while another figure, labeled “Stude Body,” turns away in disgust. This heads an editorial, “Boost Wisconsin.” “Empty heads are the cause of mental revolution,” says this wise editor—forgetting about stomachs. He denounces “a small group, yet a very insistent and annoying group,” which is attacking its alma mater. “Wisconsin welcomes criticism, but criticism made in a holy and healthy manner. Wisconsin has no room for knockers. They are not welcome.... Let those with radical thoughts keep them to themselves.”
I turn to the front cover of this satisfied publication; it portrays a table in a lobster palace, with a semi-nude girl-student at a supper-party with a man-student. There is a quart bottle of liquor on the table, and another in a bucket of ice beside the table, and the man-student has fallen asleep, dead drunk. Such is student life according to the “Wisconsin Octopus” for May, 1922. And in case this issue be not representative, I take up that of January, 1922. This also portrays on the cover a semi-nude girl-student at a “prom” with a young man-student, who can scarcely be distinguished from the one in the “Arrow” collar advertisement on the back cover. The frontispiece of the issue consists of a drawing entitled: “The Clock Watcher,” and we discover that a “clock watcher” is a man-student observing the ankles of a girl-student. On the next page we find a poem, which speaks for itself:
Absinth makes the heart grow fonder,
Make the lights go blinking yonder,
Makes one lamp-post seem like ten,
Absent absinth, come again.
On the next page we find a cartoon, portraying a semi-nude girl-student, sunk in a lounging chair, smoking a cigarette; we are told:
A good woman’s a good woman,
But a smoke’s a smoke.