76 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



They are about the planning of courses in athletics, in dramatics, 

 in rushing, in tubbing, in college traditions generally. They have 

 their own uses for the incoming freshman class, and their own 

 elaborate and trying admission requirements. They condescend to 

 notice the faculty's college when it becomes necessary to take their 

 proteges in tow and make a dead set against some assumed weak spot in 

 the college's entrance defenses. Mostly, to the freshman's eye, there is 

 a whir of automobiles, a rushing to and fro with excited conferences 

 over innumerable projects which bear little relation to the ideals with 

 which he set out from home. The conversation he hears is not of 

 studies or ideals of study. The standards of conduct, of appreciation 

 of priceless opportunity, are what might be expected of a generation 

 brought up on the modern daily newspaper, with town and city envi- 

 ronment, whose fathers will set them up in business when college days 

 are over, and who will take with ill-grace and much contempt of regu- 

 lations the little learning they can not avoid without risking the pleas- 

 ures and excitements which chiefly mark their progress toward a 

 learned degree. If the freshman is put wise early he learns to submit 

 with as much composure as possible to whatever rough treatment of his 

 own person the college world decrees as appropriate to his crude state 

 of development : the college authorities not being in this game, either. 

 If above the hubbub his ear catches the announcement of an address to 

 the entering class by the president of the college on Thursday evening, 

 he knows that is a signal for special activity on the part of his sopho- 

 more friends. Consequently he stays in his room — unless, perchance, 

 constrained to come flying forth in unceremonious fashion. But if the 

 meeting be advertised for midday he may hear, for a moment, an echo 

 of those ideals and principles which had beckoned and fortified him as 

 he made his decision for a college course. This impression, however, is 

 quickly swallowed up in the whoop-er-up speeches and cheers in behalf 

 of college activities, in which the faculty seemingly participates with 

 equal abandon. On registration day, for a brief space the college once 

 more seems to hold sway; then it and its ideals fade into dim distance, 

 while the real, absorbing college of student life resumes the scepter. 

 When classes begin he follows instinctively a habit not yet outgrown, 

 and essays to enroll with his instructors. But the freshman who had 

 been something of a leader in his home school, who was thought to have 

 learned a measure of self-reliance, who had even filled a position of re- 

 sponsibility in a very real experiment in self-government, now finds 

 that he has by no means learned his place. While the academic side- 

 show of lectures and recitations is getting itself started in halting fash- 

 ion, the freshman is in the fierce struggle and joy of real college life. 

 As free of conventional wrappings as nature made him, he is paraded 

 and tubbed in open daylight around faculty lawns and by campus 



