And this from a "mixed" college!
FROM the tone of the College Courier, published at Monmouth College, III., we should judge that institution to be a sort of overgrown Sunday school. A poem entitled "The Drunkard's Soliloquy," which would serve as ballast for half a dozen numbers of an ordinary college paper, is followed by a choice little essay on "A Chew o' Tobacco." Did space permit, we should be only too happy to quote it for the edification of our own readers. Knowing that this College is a "mixed" college, we are not surprised to learn that such a subject as "Wife, Man's Best Treasure," is a favorite one for essays; nor does the following decision of the editors puzzle us, "that it is no breach of etiquette for a lady to greet her gentlemen classmates on the street with a bow of recognition, although she may not have had a formal introduction."
"While in the subject of electricity, the sphere of communication was wittily termed sparking distance by a promising Junior." - College Courier.
WE learn from the Record that a member of '75, at Harvard, has favored that journal with a communication containing information with reference to the ball and boating interests, and the relation of '75 to each of the college papers. This aspirant for the favors of the Record is treated rather gingerly by that paper. In the first place, the editors refuse to permit a letter from an anonymous correspondent; in the second place, they do not like the idea of having a correspondent; in the third place, they say that not even a knowledge of his name would justify them in printing his first letter; but finally soften toward him, and remark that "possibly his second may be of a more satisfactory nature. If so, it will avail nothing without his name."
THE tone of Western college journalism is, in most cases, far different from what we could desire. Even in those colleges where the periodicals are most mature, now and then there crops out some illustration of the puerilities with which the students are amused. Not only in their publications are these manifested, but from various editorials and communications found in those papers we are led to judge that such practices as "burning physics" and "cane rushes" are by no means allowed to die out. On the contrary, every year witnesses additions to the number of meaningless ceremonies. From the Chronicle we learn that '74 in Michigan University is addicted to this sort of thing.
Lately students to the number of two hundred paraded the streets of Ann Arbor and finally adjourned to the ball-ground, where Physics was burned amid a great deal of speech-making. For a novelty this year they were to repair en classe to Rettich's beer saloon. Imagine a class at Harvard making all this fuss in order to secure a reunion at Carl's.
One of the professors in Michigan University lately resigned, and the Chronicle ascribed this to the "meddlesome disposition" of a Professor of History. In the next issue there is printed a communication from a graduate, signifying his hearty assent to the manner in which this paper treats him of the "meddlesome disposition," and urging that not a moment's peace be allowed that model professor until he resigns. Truly they have model graduates and model editors, as well as model professors.
Not content with having dealt such a staggering blow at the above-mentioned professor, they print an article entitled "The Classics and Courtesy," in which another instructor has his character badly mangled. Some glimmering of its nature may be derived from the following sentence: "Perhaps there is something in the nature of the classics (for it is in the men who have to do with these that we notice chiefly a tendency to Johnsonian faults) which, when it has impregnated the human system, works upon the internal organization of its victim, and finally culminates in a morbid sensitiveness in regard to the musty languages of the ancients, which, whenever any unlucky student fails to comprehend the manifold beauties of some brain-racking passage, breaks out into an ungovernable passion, and vents itself in language that is a disgrace to the man who utters it and an insult to the student to whom it is directed." We should say so.