Princeton University - Nassau Herald Yearbook (Princeton, NJ)

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Yoon P1c1NcE'roN Princeton of which we have any record, and I am positive that he himself was only tinkering with the course of study proposed by his predecessor, Mr. Dickinson. It will be tinkered with as long as there is any curriculum remaining, and it will be criti- cized by the campus, world without endg for the only course of study that can satisfy the entire campus is one which will have no backbone at all, and which will be a course only in name. I shall do some tinkering myself a little later in this articleg the opportunity is too good to lose. But for the present let us pass on to another topic. Princetonians of this generation do not need Mr.'Canby of Yale to tell them that our present race of undergraduates are energetic beyond belief, or that they are ubusy in a hundred direetionsf' VVith a smaller enrollment than her leading rivals Princeton is running the same sort of undergraduate activities as they, on the same standards, and in some fields perhaps do- ing better work. If the present pace is to be maintained it was high time thatisome system should have been injected into the management and distribution of our welter of outside interestsg and I think I see an illustration of the growing common sense of campus life in the long step toward centralization recently taken by the Senior Council in establishing a Committee on '79 'IWIGERS I 15 l

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THE NAssAU HE1lALD 1916 DANCE Conmurrma Far be it from me to claim that the faculty knows all that is worth knowing about this problemg but the weakness in the average campus discussion of Princeton's intellectual back- ground is that the blame is always laid on the curriculum and at the door of the faculty room, when, after all-, the chief in- herent difficulty remains untouched-to wit, the extreme re- luctance of the average American undergraduate to do any more real intellectual work than will enable him to save his academic skin unscathed. And no curriculum however generous in scope will meet this basic obstacle toward real maturity. It is not what you study but how you study that educates. I sup- pose somebody else has already said that, but it is worth ap- propriating here. Examine yourselvesg to what extent have you genuinely, consistently, seriously .studied during the years you have spent here? e 1 The curriculum has been tinkered with periodically by the faculty ever since President Burr planned the first one for mi

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THE NAssAU HERALD Undergraduate Activities. Until this reorganization was ef- fected it Was hard to name an activity which did not keep 'before it as its main obligation the necessity of -producing, in the real- istic vocabulary of the campus, as much ugravyv as possible for its managing members. VVe seem suddenly to have out- grown that primitive notion. If one considers for a moment the field of operation lying before this Committee the possibilities within its grasp appear to be limited only by the number of activities maintained and the size of the undergraduate body. I am told that it super- vises and co-ordinates the work of the dance committees, the dining halls committee, the intra-collegiate athletic executive committee, the undergraduate' schools committeeg under its supervision a new constitution has been adopted whereby posi- tions on the Brio-ci-Brac board are made partially competitive and the spoils largely cut down, in consultation with it the dramatic and musical organizations have adopted a plan offco- operationg under its direction the dance committees have pooled their budgets and the schools committee has taken up the work which the school and sectional clubs never did and is handling the distribution of Princeton reading' matter among schoolboys in an efficient and businesslike way. Even that impregnable Gibraltar of easy money, the Daily Prifn-cetonian has listened to the voice of the times and has placed its editors and man- agers on a scale of salaries instead off allowing them remuner- ation based on loose and unfair privilege. ltlinor changes, but steps in the same direction, have made appointive the cheer leaderships, the advertising managerships of the Triangle Club, and positions on the Nassau Heraldg and perhaps by the time this paragraph is in type the major sport managerships will also have become appointive. VVhether the committee has taken steps to remedy the chief evil of our present condition, the con- centration of extra-curriculum activities on a comparatively small group of men who therefore have more to do than is good for them, is a question that I cannot answer. One thing is fairly clear: the committee has a full-grown job on its hands. rwi