University of Wisconsin Madison - Badger Yearbook (Madison, WI)

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all the confusion, pressure, weariness, play of gaiety and brutality, of feeling, thinking, of blind reaction and grop-ing control? This question is allied to an ancient question about life, to which the bald physical eye will return one report, seeing nothing; and the intellectual will retort that it is that which you yourself build; but the intuitionist will answer that it is the essential life, essential being, if you like, of which one is aware or one is not aware. Robert Henri in The Art Spirit—that collection of diary entries and letter extracts and class-room utterance which constitute a microscope for all form—Robert Henri declares that to be competent to divine the Form distinguishes the artist from the sleeper. But we are all sleepers. The most that we can hope is to wake a little. For awaking even a little, we discern the Form of the occupation or the personality—even the parent or the institution with which we are most concerned. At the end of a half hour's interview one morning, a young New York newspaper woman was saying goodbye to me, when I ventured: We have been talking together for half an hour, and we haven't talked of anything that matters. She said: What does matter? Nothing in life, that 1 have ever found. Nothing in death. Nothing after death. What could we have talked about that matters? She had said, earlier, that she hoped sometime to paint or to write. But now I thought that I saw in her a complete sleeper. I hazarded silently that she would never write or paint—until she became ever so little aware. By her words, at least, she seemed to have no knowledge of anything save of that which meets the eye. But some intimation of the Form within appearance is an essential of the artist. He may not be self-conscious about it, but have it he must. He may be interested only in appearance, but he must be able to paint or to write about the appearance as being more than appearance: as being, in fact, but the vesture of the Form, of the unforgotten thing-in-itself. The technique of interpreting and experiencing an institution, a routine, a job, a family, a personality, is the technique of any art. And, like the artist, one may thus become independent of routine, because no matter how completely absorbed in externals are all those with whom one is dealing, if one is oneself aware of Form, one is always entertained. One may even be more than entertained.

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ON BEING ENTERTAINED The art of being connected with a university must presuppose an ability ... to discern the perpetual, the insistent University Form. By ZONA GALE A UNIVERSITY, which stands for the long ern croachment of the things of the mind, is yet for' ever finding itself involved in other routines. Politics, policies, budgets, realignments, all the variations of physical pattern continually occupy the foreground. It is only in the noticeable moments that the essential Uni' versity Form emerges: in the great convocation, the out' standing class'hour, the memorable drama, the rich and sincere college annual, the ceremonial which contrives to express itself and not merely its own humor, the arresting faculty personality, or the spectacle and the reactions of the really integrated group. But during much of the time, just as in family or community living, one cannot see the city for the houses, the forest for the trees. If I may write of a personal experience, there was the naive amazement and shock of my first meeting with the Wisconsin University board of regents. I had taken my appointment seriously, as giving me a part in the processes of that educational institution which means the most to me. Here should be moving those matters which should shape and stimulate the lives of thousands; the oppor' tunity seemed one of incredible moment to me. On that first day I went into the Administration Building with a revival of all that I had felt when, still a high school stu-dent, I had first walked up the hill; or when I went out from my own commencement day. And then, far from preoccupations with great policies and possibilities, we spent virtually the whole morning discussing whether somebody should be engaged as foot' ball coach, and whether the University could afford to pay him so-and-so many thousand dollars a year. There followed, at later meetings, inspection of in-terminable lists of fellows and instructors who were to be advanced, or to have vacation without pay, or to have substitute appointments; hours of reports about utterly dull routines, hours of complaints to be heard, full days of figures. Once I thought, “If it were not for apprecia' tion of the appointment, I should resign from the board, saying, ‘I love the University, but I cannot go through these meetings'. Of course all this lightened. There came days of thrill' ing discussion and decision, there came matters of sig-nificance and sovereign interest, there came the quite delightful fellowship of the group. But it was only in these noticeable moments that the University Form emerged and could be met. I had had this kind of experience before. I had gone to visit a celebrated club, whose name was regarded as that of some center of energy. And after an hour there, I remember thinking: But this must be an off night. Surely these people . . . this program ... But it was not an off night; it was the usual routine, participated in by the usual members. But the Form of the club (as an energy center and as a brightness) was in that routine utterly obscured. First days of school, of dormitory life, first days at jobs, at the practice of any art—it is not in these that the es' sencc of the experience is opened. One owns to the initial thrill, then the disillusion, the fatigue, the grind; last of all comes divination of the Form. But even after the Form emerges, still the routine, the grind, the insistence of physical pattern, and ail the domain of the discrete, remains to curtain and even to obscure it. The art of being connected with a university, in any capacity, must presuppose an ability to receive the dis-Crete, the cumbersome, the routine of the physical pat-tern—even the politics and the budget and the dull con' nective tissue of development—and still to be aware, to discern the perpetual, the insistent University Form. What is the Form? What is this Form that lies back of

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10 POLITICS AND POLICY BESET on the one hand by the most precarious fi-nancial situation in the University's history, and on the other with proposals for its abolition as an execu-tive body, the Board of Regents spent a year of the most feverish activity. The shadow cast by the death, early in March, of Miss Elizabeth Waters, vice-president of the Board, was a profound one. President Frank said simply and beautifully: “If the secular forces of mankind could confer sainthood, she would even now be canonized in the hearts of the thousands whose lives she warmed and illumined. . . . Even in a world bereft of faith she would still have immortality in the lives she has touched and when they had died, she would still live in the legends of her loveliness they would leave to their children. The general tone of its deliberations and decisions has been decidedly conservative. Even the university faculty seemed revolutionary by comparison, notably in the Regent-Faculty disagreement over abolition of the compulsory gymnasium requirement, and the university's athletic policy. Veteran battler for liberalism. Regent Meta Berger, faced a Board that feared any decided change, and in many instances she stood alone. The budget situation was, of course, the main concern. But the Regents' hands were tied by the persistent prospect of a State Legislature which would go ahead with its budget-cutting irregardless of the Board's pleas or programs. Consequently, the policy of the Regents was to conserve wherever possible, without making any decided and general attempt to re-organize the university on more economical lines. The Board adopted the plan of not filling vacancies in the faculty, wherever such a procedure was possible; it turned back to the state $120,000 in capital and maintenance funds in order to meet the emergency; and it transferred funds from department to department in a frantic effort to make all of the cash go around. Although recognizing the fact that over $90,000 worth of their budget troubles was due to a drop in out-of-state students, the Board remained apparently oblivious to arguments that it would be a policy of enlightened self-interest to lower non-resident tuition fees. One of the few pitched battles between the Faculty and the Regents resulted pacifically in a victory for the former after months of deliberation. The controversy arose as a result of a report submitted by Prof. V. A. C. Henmon, psychologist, and other experts on the compulsory gym question. The Committee report, concluding that compulsory gym for the first two years was both Backus, Ullspcrgcr. Grady, Gumkrsen, Berger, Runge. Frank, Clausen, Phillips, McCalFrcy, Eimon, Wilkie, Sholts, Christophcrson. physically undesirable and financially wasteful, was passed by the Faculty and referred to the Board of Regents. Without stating its direct disapproval, the Board sent the suggestion back to the Faculty for certain alterations. These were made, and despite a chorus of disapproval and tearful groaning on the part of the Reserved Officers' Training Corps officials and the athletic officials, the proposal for a reduction of the compulsion to one year was submitted to the faculties of the various colleges for approval. The Faculty of the College of Letters and Science followed the Regents' suggestion when it agreed to give regular university credit to the basic corps of the R. O. T. C. for the first two years of military training. The faculty also agreed to cut down on the credits given to the cadets in the advanced corp. Soon after the gubernatorial election had resulted in a change of party, rumors were current to the effect that abolition of the Board of Regents was being considered. This move, it was whispered, was to be a part of the Democratic program to centralize the educational organization of the State in a special Commission to control all of the schools, colleges, and the State University. The Board of Regents, whatever may have been its inadequacies as a strong executive organ, will probably continue to operate in the glorious tradition of service and intelligence which for over fifty years has been its heritage. The danger is that it will become an organ of party interest and selfish particularism -that it will be used by politicians or fanatics for their own ends. As long, however, as the Board of Regents remains true to its noble past, it will neither be weak as an executive body (as it was this year with its hands tied financially) nor in danger of abolition or incapacitation.