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Page 29 text:
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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
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Page 30 text:
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management of their affairs. They certainly don ' t; they don ' t have a confounded thing to say. We are not complaining of this fact; it is as it should be; the undergraduate body is altogether too large to allow of self-manage- ment. What irks us is that the existence of this body which pretends to effective com- munication between the university and the undergraduate body only serves to obscure from the student vision the absoluteness of administrative authority. The successive in- stances of the automobile ban, deferred rushing, and the J-Hop house parties con- clusively illustrate the absence of student influence on important legislation, to say nothing of actual student control. This fact is overcome in the student mind by random resolutions hastily concocted by the council pursuant to some business before the ad- ministration: Resolved that students need not return to classes following Thanksgiving, and the like. The administration is amenable to the council ' s practice of playing follow the leader since it is immaterial whether it follows or not. Thus we have the illusion of student government. The objection to this myth is that it deters the realization of the inevitable adjustment between the university and students. The control of the campus necessarily lies with the administration now that the size of the student body precludes its effective organiza- tion. If the student council should cease floundering after the senate committee will o ' the wisp, the students could more clearly see the true situation and appreciate what vehicles for communication with the university they do possess. Then a true interest in the student publications would cause the realiza- tion of their potentialities as student expres- sions. Possibly representations of the student mind by honor societies could be included in the president ' s report to the regents, in which the undergraduates are now only interpreted to their governors by the dean of students. Students ' publicity could well be developed beyond reports of their errata. The long overdue removal of the Student Council from the university scene would be only another step in the rationalization of the campus. Increased educational opportunities and demands have put a premium on the student time which is slowly purging the campus of its superfluous activities. The healthy activities are publications, debating, and the theatre, which recommend themselves as communal assets and as being genuinely beneficial to their participants. These activi- ties are tending to operate more intelligently with corresponding units in the university, to their mutual benefit, in contrast to the sterile autonomy of the old campus. This trend in campus values is a genuine compliment to the university. THE STADIUM NOT because college athletics have changed materially in the last ten years have they been under an intense fire of late, but rather has it been due to a recent drastic change in the country ' s attitude toward spectacle sport, from the Davis Cup to inter- national polo matches. This change in attitude is a product of the revolution in recreational sport towards the English ideal. An enormous expansion in athletic facilities particularly evidenced in golf course and tennis court construction has extensively changed the individual ' s participation in sport from collect- ively vicarious to individually actual. Hence the ex-spectator ' s reaction towards his old athletic mainstay. Although the individual ' s emancipation from the reign of spectacle sport has resulted in an unfortunate vandalism of his former idol, this iconoclastic attitude has removed much of the artificiality and cant surrounding it. The stadium is no longer regarded as a temple dedicated to the creation of intercollegiate amity. Such events as the severance of athletic relations between Harvard and Prince- ton, Army and Navy, are significant as punctuation marks to common and more or less intensely antagonistic feelings engendered between schools in the avowed friendly rivalry of the gridiron; and all over an artificial athletic contest not involving any legitimate merit of either institution represented! The question as to whether the stadium or sport hysteria should survive seems settled in favor of the former now that the systems of values our universities exist, in part, to develop have begun to prevail over the issues involved in this mental mole hill. Again, the football season is no longer considered that of the flowering of character, appointed to the player by his coaches, although if athletes who play football because they enjoy the game are able to maintain a surplus of pleasure after a season in which they are mistreated by a juvenile public as its property, then football is emphatically character building; in fact it is producing a group of supermen, if any. That the undergraduates engaged in the sport seem to feel it worth their while is a sufficient justification of football. Sympathy for the hard working athlete pulled off his late pedestal is as absurd as the former idolatry. This stadium debunking process has removed much of the spectator ' s inane pseudo-partici-
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