What is a monitor, and why? This question on an intelligence test would bring forth as great a variety of answers as the famous John Hancock riddle. To the College Office, he is merely a bit of machinery in a complex system, like the time-clock of a business establishment. To the individual in the course, he represents the frailties of the human flesh, to be plied with the wine of excuse and entreaty until his will is bent to the individual's purpose. The storm of hard-luck stories and heart-appeals that daily besiege a monitor's ear would do credit to a Hollywood composition course. And it is the sternest of the monitorial clan that cannot be bent now and then before the storm.

It is easy to suggest that this is as it should be: perhaps the monitor ought to be (as he really is in practice now), the human element to make the machinery fit individual cases. Such an idea at once meets with popular favor. Why not let the monitor replace the deans in passing on causes of absence? He has the undergraduate point of view, and his mediation can save the overworked office much troublesome routine.

Unfortunately, the suggestion is like most attempts to justify mistakes, in that it overlooks the original cause. If students could be trusted to have a genuine excuse for each absence, monitorship would never have been invented.

Besides, monitors cannot be expected to be omniscient. Even in our civilized community, there are still an unscrupulous few whose slogan is "outs at any cost". As long as the instinct to "get away with something" remains, the monitor's task will be a thankless one and consistent impartiality cannot be expected.

Such is the problem. The moral: Establish timeclocks in the classrooms.