Birmingham Southern College - Southern Accent Yearbook (Birmingham, AL)

Page 15 text:

With his peers and like his administrative superiors, the student may engross his days here in his own strange sort of building pro- gram and regulation procedure. You build a carefully patterned campus image; a busy schedule of meetings, classes, dates; a record of grades, credits, hours, honors . . . you put a regulatory limit on introspection, personal involvement, solitude. There is here a deceptive ease in laying hour on hour, day on day in a veritable wall of activities. Eventually, you find that you are only building the pressure higher and higher within yourself until your very brain is exploding with too much cramming of fact and not enough thought . . . until your hands constantly clench and unclench in a futility of empty anger . . . until you are smoking too much, laughing a little too loudly, finding the minutes of dormitory and library quietness unbearable . . . and nervously searching for someone besides yourself to listen to the sound of your words. Mianina s.n ' 11

Page 17 text:

Breaking through the meaningless, you learn here something a little more than merely bettering your existence: the essentiality of individual absorption in a world of group motivational activites. When there is realization of this collegiate world as an all-too-brief chance for self-discovery, there is a definition of college or more specifically Birmingham-Southern . Admittedly, this is an idealized viewpoint, but one purpose of a college is based on the highly idealized principle of man ' s innate drive for self-fulfillment. Idealized or not, the inner search was never unmarked by long stretches of loneliness, despair, or doubt; no maturity was ever fully attained without the sting of momentary defeat or the manna of equally momentary success. The campus, the carrel, the classroom are minute battlegrounds for the emergent individual and the emergent college. 13