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Kansas University Weekly.
SEVERAL MEMBERS of the University are talking of organizing a country club, the purpose of which is to encourage students, and members of the faculty as well, to get out into the country once in a while and forget about the routine of their more or less monotonous lives. It is, perhaps, not the best season of the year for undertaking anything of this kind, and yet there are many fine days in winter, and there is plenty of cold, bracing air to stimulate one, and to make walking, or riding a pleasure. There are probably many students who will be interested in the club, there is certainly a large number who ought to become interested in some form of exercise and follow it regularly for health's sake.
A GREAT improvement is being made in the appearance of that portion of the campus lying in the ravine north of Snow Hall. Heretofore the weeds and underbrush have held undisputed control of the place, and no one but an enthusiastic botanist or entomologist or some youthful would-be Stanley has ever dared to penetrate this miniature wilderness. Now, however, the brush and weeds are rapidly disappearing; the lower branches of the trees are being trimmed off; a little later in the winter blue-grass seed will be sown, and it requires only a moderate exercise of the imagination to picture here as pretty a little park as could be desired. This is exactly what University students have all been wishing for these many years; somewhere to go for a short walk between classes; a place in which to eat open-air dinners in fine weather, and some grove in the vicinity of town in which to have picnic parties, etc. The park, of course, will not be complete without a band-stand, and the band-stand in turn will call for a University band, so that on the balmy spring and autumn evenings of the future we may expect to hear sweet music and the sound of happy voices proceeding from the place where before could be heard only the croaking of tree toads and the singing of the locusts.
VERILY IT may be said of us also, that we have ears but hear not. The first number on the Lecture Bureau course, while greeted by a large audience, was not attended by a just proportion of University students. That a course of entertainments of this sort, arranged for, and controlled entirely by members of the University and offered at a remarkably low price, should not be taken advantage of by the ones for whose especial benefit it is intended, shows a lack of appreciation which cannot but excite wonder.
The remainder of the course is well worth the price of a season ticket, and will, it is to be hoped, receive better support from the students than was indicated by the attendance at the Salisbury concert.
ONE OF the most deplorable features of foot ball games—and some other games as well—is the intensely partisan spirit and unreasoned excitement which is aroused in the minds of the spectators. It is getting to be a common occurrence for a crowd to invade the field at critical points in the game and take an active part in any dispute which may have arisen between players. The spirit which prevails among the supporters of foot ball seems to have become almost entirely what has been defined as a professional one, a blind, unrestrained passion for victory at whatever cost. This fact is illustrated by the almost total lack of enthusiasm for a losing team, no matter how well it plays. The game is only partly to blame for this. The trouble lies in the false idea which college students and others seem to have of college sports; the idea that the end of an athletic team's existence is to make every other similar team bow the knee in defeat. If this is all or even the most to be gained; if the physical condition of the student body as a whole is not to be improved; if amusement or advertisement is the chief thing sought, then it may rightly be questioned whether there is longer any place for an athletic team in an institution of learning.