University of Michigan - Michiganensian Yearbook (Ann Arbor, MI)

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michiganensian 1931 EDITORIALS THE CAMPUS THE present day campus is not the logical product of the modern university and student temper. The change of the under- graduate body from a unit to a mass petrified the form of the campus. Since that event a part of the student body has been working within the archaic boundaries of institutions it can no longer change. This practical rigidity was demonstrated several years ago when a forced farce had to be substituted for a normal interested vote to amend the Union constitution. This same factor of student body size has rendered many of the preserved institutions entirely obsolete and others rather unserviceable. All-campus election s are no longer the out- growth of student opinion. That they are insignificant was recognized by the Union when it left them for the merit system. The long-run personnel of the Student Council and the Student Christian Association is an eloquent on comment the efficiency of these elections. Obviously a voting group of nearly ten thousand cannot intelligently select officers for these organizations whose activities can possibly come before so few voters. But more fundamental than the objection to the election system is that to the raison d ' etre of the organizations themselves. In a way the Student Christian Association is the most typical example of organization decadency on the campus. That it originally had a legitimate existence is indicated by its birth in the amalgamation of three similar societies. Its present ubiquitous activities may be briefly represented by camp management, the conducting of tutoring classes, convocation competition with the partly filled local churches, and the maintenance of a lending library, Shelley paring onions. A rather quixotic struggle for recognition and a gigantic waste in a four year educational experience. The Student Council is chiefly responsible for the elongated life of the bloated and feeble class organization which is resigning as a convenient social unit to the fraternity. The great significance of the class of yesteryear, manifested in the reunions of old classes, has of necessity devolved into the two digits one finds after his name in the Student directory. The bases for the activity of the old class were inter-class athletics, underclass rivalry, and class social functions, the latter of which have been perpetuated by the Student Council pullmotor. The inter-class games are historical farces in which the unwitting underclassmen are cast by the council as deadly enemies, which parts they play very poorly despite the red and green make-ups. This is because each class is too large to have its own group consciousness to say nothing of forming a definite attitude towards another fifteen hun- dred students who chanced to enroll the year following or previous to it. And what attitude can it form now that the broad dispensation of surface culture has antiquated the traditional discrepancy between the gaping freshman and the sophisticated sophomore? The council is pretty hard put to find some- thing to do. Aside from chronology of entrance and graduation and these abortive athletics, the class is distinguished by its trumped-up dances. When considered that, where in the old days a class dance was more or less of an oasis in a social desert, a modern party is a mere drop in a bucketful of League, Union, and fraternity dances, the party would seem to be relatively insignificant and doomed to a financial failure. And that is precisely the situation. The council attempts to maintain this fine old tradition through emotional appeals and the actual conscription of its acquaintances, a sort of a social shanghai. The element of coercion became more prom- inent this year when the council and ad- ministration saved the J-Hop by a transfusion necessitated after the prohibition of fraternity dances on J-Hop night. To complete the fitting-out of each group of students bound together by simultaneous entrance as the complete class in the fashion of the nineties, the council directs its election of four officers who deal with the problem of collecting enough dues to buy their pictures into the Michiganensian. This completes the air-pawings of that nebulous entity, the class, unless it should gather enough members and money to perpetuate its memory with a con- crete settee. If the council and class were isolated from each other, it would be interest- ing to see which would first disappear. Aside from a tremendous waste of effort and confusion of issues, these gasping activities do little harm so long as the campus retains its sense of humor. It is curious that the council has withstood the administration ' s program against outstanding leeches on the students ' time. In the light of the complete- ness of university control its mere existence is a cookie thrown to the students lest they feel they have nothing to say about the