The University Morale

The college student who spends all of his time outside of classes playing on athletic teams, serving on committees, and working on publication staffs, loses much of the intellectual curiosity which is essential to his proper education. He loses much of his leisure, and leisure is necessary for the development of this intellectual curiosity. The active man attains it only in exceptional cases, and consequently he is the one who finishes college with a degree perhaps, but without any education or culture to proclaim to the world any greater academic achievement than that of graduating from his home town high school.

Such students have received severe censure at the hands of Ruth Steele Brooks, writing in the May issue of Scribner's who says: "Often the greater part of the student's day, aside from classes is spent in some sort of meeting, or preparing for them, meetings of departmental clubs, with programs, papers, and refreshments (someone must make arrangements for these things) or committee meetings over student government, to mention but two possibilities."

This sort of student is in truth found upon every campus: he is a parasite to the attainment of ideal educational conditions. Yet, as Miss Brooks says, the work must be done, and since this is so, it should be distributed over the whole student body in order to prevent any one student from losing sight of the real object of his being at college. If he does this, he hurts the university morale. On the other hand he may be helping himself, for by serving in these ways, he may develop himself better than he would did he become an ideal student. It is for him to develop this sort of thing elsewhere than about college campuses, however. Cornell Daily Sun.