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Kansas University Weekly.
PROFESSORS, when practicable make your announcements through the columns of the WEEKLY.
We have lately noticed in our exchanges some excellent songs for use at football games. Many of them are parodies of well known pieces and could be committed to memory in a short time. "Rally Round the Tiger—Boys" is a new one lately written for Missouri. We must have something of this kind at once. Send in your productions and we will print them so that we may all learn the best ones before Thanksgiving.
At last commencement one of the prominent speakers said to the members of the senior class that if they had not learned to think, their school work had been practically fruitless. It seemed as though the time for impressing this truth upon the students had been poorly chosen. Probably there were none in that class who had not learned to think better than when they entered school, but yet there was a touch of sadness in the thought that there might be some who were leaving the University for the last time, who had never realized what was the great end of their work. And in the hours of sorrowful retrospection how such an one would wish that he had been made to know the true goal to be striven for when he first began his first year of study in the University. There is no greater need of the University than that every student should have a deep consciousness of the simple fact that if when he receives his diploma he has not learned to think for himself, and think hard, his own more or less earnest work, and the sacrifices of those who have given him the opportunity to work have been in vain. A clear understanding of this on the part of every student would raise the standard of school work a hundred per cent. It would create a half dozen good literary societies. It would take care of inter-state debates and oratorical contests, and keep the cup of enthusiasm for these matters running over. In fact it would do more than anything else to build up the ideal University.
PRESIDENT Canfield made a few remarks the other day to the editor of the Ohio university paper, and we reprint them as being universal in their application: When the president was told that clubs of from two to forty-two were all reading the same paper, he asked, whether each of these clubs was using one napkin. The president also suggested that the students send the college paper regularly to their parents. That would be cheaper, more regular and take less time than writing long letters. He suspected that it would be more interesting and gratifying to the parents.
Now if the students of Kansas University want to adopt this plan of sending a paper home instead of a letter we are willing. They will see to it then that the Weekly gets all the news. And if nothing but a letter will do, then write it to the Weekly and it will be published, and an extra copy sent to the writer's home.
The article in regard to spitting on the floor which was printed in the Weekly for Oct. 10, has been instrumental in calling forth several equally severe condemnations of this sin from other college papers. The Students' Herald of Manhattan reprinted the article entire, with strong endorsement. It does not seem possible that anyone whose attention has been called to the vileness and noxiousness of the habit of spitting on the floor will go on allowing himself to be a public nuisance. And yet there are a few "spitters" left in the University. Most of them are merely thoughtless, and need only to be aroused to a consciousness of the real evil of the habit. A few, however, belong to the class of "well dressed savages," as Howell calls them, who never lose an opportunity to show their indifference for the common laws of politeness and decency. They are characterized by an impressive swagger and a weary-of-life facial expression, and but for these acquirements would never be noticed. It seems hopeless to attempt to treat these would-be cases of total depravity; but their fewness makes them conspicuous, and a plain, unvarnished rebuke might have a wholesome effect upon them.