Nobby Cutaway and Sack Suits at Steinberg's Clothing House.
The Weekly University Courier
The Largest College Journal Circulation in the United States.
Published Every Friday Morning by the
COURIER COMPANY For Kansas University Students.
CHAS. LYONS,
President.
O. B. TAYLOR,
Secretary.
EDITORIAL STAFF:
FRANK G. CROWELL, EDITOR-IN-Chief,
ASSOCIATES
JOIN PRESCOTT,
F. C. KRYS,
H. F. SABBINS,
H. F. M. BAER,
W. R. ARMSTRONG,
NAN, LOVE,
LILLIR FIERMAN,
GRETHIT HUNICUTTI
BUSINESS MANAGERS:
EARLE L. SWOFE. | WILL A. JACKSON,
From the Press of P. T. FOLEY.
Entered at the post-office at Lawrence, Kansas,
as second-class matter.
The question of college expenses and at what cost our boys and girls can be educated is being discussed by the leading journals and magazines throughout the country. In another column appears an able article taken from the University Voice which so well expresses our views on the subject that we publish it in full.
MICHIGAN, although composing within its borders some of the best educational institutions in the west, has no representation in the InterState Oratorical association. Whether it is from neglect or from the deficiency of training of the oratorical faculties of her students we are not prepared to say. All the progressive institution in the west and northwest have representatives in these contests productive of the greatest benefit and Michigan should be reprinted.
RUSKIN the great art critic is insane. A man recognized as a critic of art, as eloquent, fearless and learned as has ever lived. A personage learned in art and in science, master of the English language, a public benefactor, a friend of the working-man, a writer on political economy has past away and the world has been deprived of one who although eccentric was undoubtedly a man of genus and an honor to society and the human race.
The standard of a college is estimated in a great degree from the number of bright men they send out into the world and the stand they take in society, literature and politics We notice that four of the candidates on the State ticket of Ohio, are graduates from the Ohio Wesleyan University, viz Gov. Foraker, Watson, Powell and Critchfield. Although none of the graduates of our University have as yet attained a National reputation yet in our State politics they are among the first. A great many of our graduates have become professors, editors, lawyers, doctors, preachers and railroad managers of not merely local reputation and it is only a matter of time until some of these will obtain by their industry and perseverance a national reputation.
THE victims of the most barbarious and unmanly customs of our eastern college; that of hazing are coming before the public. Two deaths have already occurred this year from the practice which is one of the lowest traits students of any college can have. The faculty of colleges where this habit has been prevalent are enacting serious rules against all those engaging in such acts. College's whose authorities license or permit such customs ought to be branded as institutions detrimental to the human race and should not recieve the patronage of any thoughtful person. Our western institutions are to be congratulated that this uncivilized custom has not appeared in their midst.
Prizes offered for literary productions will stimulate literary men and women and students of our colleges in their endeavor to produce literary articles of merit. Periodicals, newspaper and magazines, who offer some compensation for the production of these articles are in a certain sense a literary benefactor. The Hamilton Literary Monthly published by the senior class of Hamilton college will award a prize of one hundred dollars to the writer of the best essay on the subject: "The Conservativeism of American Institutions." The essay is to contain not over 7,000 words and capable and unprejudiced judges have been selected to decide on the merits of the production. Surely the great West with its men of literary ability should be represented. No one is denied the privilege of competition; professors, students and the public in general are invited to contest.
Orophilian.
There has been a great deal said upon the subject of literary societies in these columns of late. About all the argument there is in favor of good literary societies has been stated, so that we would be taking up valuable time and space if we were to say any more in that line. It is simply our purpose to place before the readers of the Courier an history of the facts in regard to the struggles of Orophilian this year.
The first Friday after school commenced Orophilian held its first meeting of the year. At first unable to secure a quorum, the members present wrestled around and got the requisite number (thirteen) together. About the only thing that was accomplished by the society was the election of a committee of three to petition the faculty and board of regents to allow them to meet in their hall in the evenings.
At the first meeting of the faculty a committee was appointed to try and free Friday afternoons of recitations. This committee either through indifference or for some unknown cause delayed making their decision known to the Orophilian committee till the first of this week, when they informed them that Friday afternoon from two till four was at their service. This hour was rejected by the committee for two reasons, first on account of the shortness of the hour.
To this proposition some members of the faculty gave their approval while others bitterly opposed it.
When the Orophilian committee again proposed an evening session they were told that their hall would not be opened to them in the evenings because it was in the main building. At the same time the committee was given to understand that the faculty would probably open the auditorium of Snow hall or the chemistry building for evening sessions, providing the society would pay for the lighting, heating, and the janitors.
This proposition would seem reasonable at first sight but when one comes to think that the janitors sweep each lecture room daily, that the buildings are heated by steam and that the fires are not allowed to die out in the furnaces from fall to spring,one can readily see that these two items would be of unnecessary expense and that the State would be making just as much extra as the student paid for these two items. The gas bill the society would without a doubt be willing to pay, indeed it would be a poor society that would not. And in our opinion it would be a poor kind of a society that would consent to pay for the janitors and the heating under the present arrangement of things. We are glad to inform our readers that through all of these difficulties Orophilian still lives and will continue to do so for many years to come.
The society has secured the hall on the third floor over Mr. Leis' drug store, corner of Massachusetts and Henry streets,and will hold a meeting there this evening.
College Expenses.
The commencement season brings its usual supply of newspaper articles on the inordinate expense of education in our modern colleges. In this case, as in so many others, the supply of articles meets a general demand. It is not easy for a father to foot enormous bills for his son at college with any patience, when he remembers the narrow fund which carried him through college, or for want of which he was compelled to give up the idea of going to college altogether. The newspaper article not only states his feeling in vigorous English, but gives him a tangible foundation for his feeling. It meets his case, and the case of countless others, too exactly not to find favor in their eyes. And so the newspapers brim with notes of the "average cost" of going through this college and that, and with reflections on the extravagance which is encouraged by the methods of the modern college life. There are, however, certain correctives which should go with the annual statistics.
An average may be mathematically true, and yet altogether delusive. "I make a statement that the average of my friends is 20 years. If my friends are 18,19,20,21,and 22 years of age,the average 20 is a useful and true expression.If,however,they are 10,15,50,25,and 30, it is less useful;and if they are 4 of them 10 years old and 1 of them 60, the average 20 is still numerically correct,but it is absurd and untruthful in the impression it gives." The last case is quite parallel with the "averages" of the expenses of classes
at the various American colleges, as they are annually published in the newspapers. The few extravagant students are able to do so much more effective work at their end than the great body of the students can do at theirs, that the "average" goes up to a figure which is quite misleading. Meantime, in the teeth of all the averages, the great body of the students go on as their fathers did, and, even at those colleges which are selected as the most expensive of all, there is always a smaller body of students who are working their way through college and showing that the "average" has no real relation to the question. There is not a college in America from which poverty alone need debar a student; there is not one from which he may not graduate, provided he has that amount of ability which will make a college education a benefit, and provided, also, he is willing to work before and through his course, and deny himself, as was the custom in our fathers' day.
It is this last custom which is going out of existence; and that is enough to show that the root of the evil does not lie in the college, but in the home. The very parents who speak so bitterly of the encouragement given to young men's extravagance by the modern college life have carefully trained their sons for just the life which they found. Usually men in moderate circumstances, they have never compelled their sons to earn a dollar in their lives, or to know the cost or value of money, or to deny themselves anything within their reach, or to do anything except spend money when a favorable opportunity offered. The sons, passing for the first time beyond the father's eye, and able to plead circumstances which parents cannot deny from personal knowledge, are in a fair position to deplete the paternal pocketbook, and have never been trained to refrain from improving such an opportunity. It is not for his own selfish gratification that the son joins this or that college society, or takes all the college papers, or "goes with the nine" to watch an inter-collegiate game in another college town, or does any of the other things for which his father has to pay,—not at all; it is only because he would be ostracized in college if he refrained from such indulgences. Such are the statements which accompany the periodical petitions for checks; and the father, finding it easier to curse course extravagance than to take the trouble of ascertaining the true state of the case, continues his mistraining of the boy by paying his bills until, at the end of the college course, the son is turned loose upon the world, to find at last what a dollar really means.
In nine cases out of ten, the student's self-control, if it led to a refusal to be enticed into unnecessary expenditures, would be simply ignored by the other students of his college. There are always cliques which would ignore himself as well; and, to this extent, the dreaded "taboo" might be endured. But this difficulty is purely subjective; it is the student himself, and its roots are in his home-training. If he has
come to the college to cultivate or value the society of such cliques, the penalty has an effective force; if he has been trained to undervalue or ig the penalty, it has no power over him. When he yields to it and writes home that he "must have" money for this, that, or the other purpose, the father who supplies this demand is cultivating further the son's vanity, and further preparing vexation of spirit for himself. For him to pay the money and thus increase the evil, while he considers it the unperformed duty of the college authorities to suppress all the societies, expel the editors of all the college papers, and to abolish the intercollegiate games, is merely another example of the decadence of American home-life and discipline. The father expects the college to do for the son what the home no longer does for him; he sends to college flabby material, and expects the material to be turned into such strong, self-poised, self-controlled manhood as the American home once furnished to the college. If the children's teeth are set on edge, it is largely because the father's have eaten sour grapes.
There can be little doubt that two-thirds of the material now sent to college would be bettered by being put into a workshop of some kind for two years between the ages of twelve and sixteen. The spread of comfort among the people have been steadily increasing the number of those who can spare their sons the necessity of work even through their years of early manhood, and we have not yet come to understand the full measure of the injury which is thus done to the charaater of the boy. At the same time, the colleges have been developing in a direction which gives greater and still greater freedom to the student, and thus brings into constantly greater prominence the evils resulting from the modern American system of home-training. To check the college in its natural course of development, to demand that it shall cease its proper work and attend to wrapping the student in cotton-wool and keeping him from the temptations incident to make permanent and irreparable the damage which is being done to young American manhood. Things must be worse before they can be better. American parents must learn that education is not complete when so many books have been finished and so many term-bills paid; that a true education consists even more largely in the training of the character and of the will than in book-knowledge. When American homes send to American colleges boys who have been trained to discriminate between the accidents of life and its essentials, the complaints of college extravagance will disappear, and a good many other evils will go with them.
Prof. - Why were you not at class Thursday? Student - Cleveland sent for me, and I went to Kansas City. Curtain falls on the Prof. delivering a lecture to the delinquent student.
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