Advice

Advice to the freshmen of Ohio State University by President William Oxley Thompson: "The best thing to do is do what you are told. Take the advice and direction of those who know more about things than you do. . . .Because of the organization of this University I can get in touch with any of the students or teachers here in 10 minutes' time. . . .Two years ago every freshman who attended these lectures was in the chapel and prepared to hear me talk in four minutes. This was possible because of the organization directed by our military officers. . . . The best thing to do is to fall into the line of University organization as soon as you can. If you don't . . . you will have lost one of the most valuable things. . . ."

Advice to the freshmen of Yale University by President James Rowland Angell: "On entering a college group, one is instantly subjected to social pressure toward conformity. . . .The experience may be distressing, but if you are worthy to be Yale men it will be wholesome. If you have no backbone, you will be carried hither and yon by every kind of fugitive opinion. . . ."

Address

Vice Chancellor Joseph Wells of Oxford University put polishing touches to an address in choicest Latin, donned historic regalia, had the students summoned before him and convoked them for the term with the following among other words (translated):

"Now, indeed, less wine and less beer are drunk but more of fancy Oriental herbs [plus orientalium herbarum decoratarum] and more of coffee, which all too often, perchance to the detriment of study and discipline, our young men and women consume in the morning hours in the city shops. And it must be confessed we older men mourn the becoming dress of our contemporaries when we see our students adorned with clothes of various colors and actually wearing trousers which, by the ambitious latitude in their fullness, are more barbarian than any which the Dacians or Sarmatians wore of old."

"Sickly, Tedious Bosh"

Yale having mitigated its compulsory chapel requirements from six to three days in the week and alternate Sundays, Vassar having laid similar plans for approval by the trustees, Dartmouth having dropped chapel compulsion completely,* all within the fortnight, the students of Amherst College cried out upon the religious duties exacted from them. Said The Amherst Student: "Is not Amherst out of step with the modern liberal trend? Certainly the sickly tedious bosh which too often passes here for formal Religion can have no attraction to a virile mind. Unless religion can stand erect and challenging without the prop of attendance statistics, it deserves to topple into obscurity."

At Princeton, where chapel attendance is voluntary except on half the Sundays of each semester, there have been recurrent protests against even this vestige of compulsion. With a new chapel abuilding at the cost of several hundred thousands, President John Grier Hibben last week deemed it advisable to say: "If all the influence which Religion has played in Princeton's history were removed our heritage would be poor indeed.

In "The Crimson"

Six news columns of The Harvard Crimson (undergraduate daily) were lately filled, not with statistics on the football team, not with routine official announcements, not with conventional stories of student activities, but with something unusual in undergraduate journalism.

The columns were headed: Confidential Guide of College Courses. The editors had had the temerity to assess the curriculum from a student point of view, to give underclassmen (especially freshmen) the benefit of upper-classmen's experience, even to criticize professorial abilities in direct, humorous and detailed fashion.

Of Anthropology, it was said: "Although anthropology is technically the most human course in college, the way it is taught deserves no such high praise. Not that it is inhuman at all, for Anthropology 1 is one of the mediocre courses which are at once the curse of the University and the backbone of its moderately high level of instruction . . . ."

Philosophy 1: "This course in elementary logic probably does as much good for the brain as swinging Indian clubs in Hemenway Gymnasium does for the body. And both forms of exercise are equally exciting. The course consists of parroting a number of logical rules-of-thumb by which the valid may be distinguished from the fallacious with as little thought as possible. At the beginning of the year, Dr. Sheffer supplied his students with a multigraphed outline of these rules, by memorizing which the more receptive of his students received passing grades in the final examination, which was highly logical of them and showed that they had not taken his course in vain."

English 72: "According to the catalog of courses, English 72 deals with the Romantic Movement in English Poetry, the most fascinating period in English Literature except for the Elizabethan outburst. But the catalog states merely that the course is conducted by Professor Lowes. If Harvard has a single great teacher today, that teacher is Professor Lowes. The average Harvard professor has plenty of erudition, knows it, and is glad to show it; but there is also the professor who has plenty of erudition, knows it, and is eager to acquire more. Professor Lowes, being a great teacher, combines the qualities, but to the submergence of the first. After a month in any of the courses the student suddenly begins to realize that he is not being conducted through a mirrored gallery of facts, but that he is being led into a mysterious country in search of intellectual adventure. In English 72 Professor Lowes is at his best. No more need be said."

English 31: ". . . . But one cannot help feeling that Professor Hurlbut would be a better guide to his students if he lived less in the literary past. While it is greatly to his credit that he should profess an admiration for the works of Jane Austen and the eighteenth century authors, it is less to his credit as an instructor that he should at the same time proclaim so complete an ignorance of Michael Arlen and his ilk, if only for the sake of pointing out the absurdities of these scriveners to his pupils."

Said the Boston Transcript: "A careful reading of the confidential Guide does not lead to the conclusion that much of it is wrong. On the contrary, the impression one gains is that most of it is right. . ."

Elderly Undergrads

At Boston University, a merchant, aged 76, enrolled with the entering class, "to brush up on a few subjects." He put his name down, not for contemplation of the Classics, but for courses in Business Administration.

At Chicago University, a state Representative -- banker, husband and father, aged 34--enrolled as a freshman to begin a four or five years' course in Politics and Law.

The Boston Transcript was reminded of a quiet man, still (presumably) knocking about the world somewhere, "who at the age of about 50 made up his mind to spend the rest of his life in studying at various universities. . . .This person first took the course at Paris and then went on to Vienna, with the intention of going on to Jena and Heidelberg after that, and of eventually bringing up at Oxford or Cambridge. . . . He must be a sort of Wandering Jew of erudition, with the important difference . . . that he goes around the world happily instead of miserably, and may leave it, with all his load of learning clinging to his soul, when his natural days are ended."

*The action at Dartmouth recalls a legend. In 1790, the College Hall being in frightful shape, the undergraduates visited that place of worship by night and ripped it asunder. None was disciplined, it being hinted that the President and trustees were secretly delighted. But a new chapel arose, "without a chimney and never profaned by a stove."