Lehigh University - Epitome Yearbook (Bethlehem, PA)

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versity is principally, by textbooks, with supplementary lectures. That feature of the railroad magnate ' s polytechnic college certainly has not changed in 76 years. If Asa ' s spirit wanders along the ridge of South Mountain and looks down over the campus, it sees hundreds of students walking from Packer Hall down to Christmas and Saucon Halls (now joined by a Hyphen tower Asa never knew) carrying notebooks in which to record the wisdom, if any, gleaned from the supplementary lectures. But there are many things which have changed. No students stand at windows in Saucon Hall to shoot at passing goats, as the Burr reports they did back in the handle-bar days of Lehigh. Arcadia me ets regularly as it did in the day of Richard Harding Davis, but its members do not engage in boxing or philosophical conversation as did Davis ' Arcadia members. Students are now allowed to take books home from the Library, a privilege they lacked back in the ' 70 ' s, although few seem to avail themselves of the opportunity. The Supply Bureau has expanded from a one-counter affair into a small department store. Compulsory attendance at chapel, long a cause of much griping among Lehigh men, is no longer with us, and students may now sleep until 8 instead of having to get up at 7 ' .4.5. The class rivalries have disappeared; and freshmen wear brown crew hats instead of dinks. Students may no longer go boating on the Lehigh river, as they once could, but automobiles swarm over the campus. Students are now officially permitted to swear (as long as they act like gentlemen) , but intoxication is still officially frowned upon, as it was back in the days when all the campus roads and paths were mud. But no matter how student life has changed, no matter how the details have been altered, no matter how many buildings have been built or how much labora- tory equipment has been installed, the educational ideas of Mr. Packer and Bishop Stevens live on. A University on South Mountain by the Lehigh River, a school whose technological training is softened and broadened by its studies in and pro- motion of the humanities and social sciences, a polytechnic college, for the education of youth, of the name, style, and title of Lehigh University — the col- lege that began down there in Christmas Hall in 1 866, the college for which Asa Packer gave half a million dollars and 56 acres of land — Lehigh University is a grand old professor. When Asa ' s spirit sees the Alumni Memorial Building tower silhouetted against the sunset, he must feel very proud. 22

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