310 Convention of Ohio College Officers. [July, 



Springing from this deplorable sentiment of a natural antagonism 

 between teaclaers and students an actual belligerent condition en- 

 sues between them. One party promulgates laws; the otber disobeys 

 them when it dares ; or, what is an evil only one degree less in 

 magnitude than actual disobedience, it renders but a formal or com- 

 pulsory compliance ; — there being, in strictness, no obedience but that 

 of the heart. One party enjoins duties ; the other evades, or grudg- 

 ingly performs them. Prohibitions are clandestinely violated. A 

 rivalry grows up between the skill and vigilance that would detect, 

 and the skill and vigilance that would evade detection. Authority 

 on the one side and fear on the other, usurp the place of love. — 

 Aggression and counter-aggression, not friendship and co-operation, 

 become the motives of conduct, and the college or the school is a 

 house divided against itself. 



We gladly acknowledge that there are practical limits, both on 

 the side of Faculties and of Students, to these deplorable results. — 

 Still, students do bear about a vast amount of suppressed and latent 

 opposition against Faculties and Teachers, which, though never de- 

 veloping itself in overt acts of mutiny or indignity, yet mars the 

 harmony and subtracts from the usefulness of all our educational 

 institutions. 



Though all students do not partake of this feeling of hostility 

 toward teachers, or in the practice of disobedience to their require- 

 ments, yet, as a matter of fact, the wrong-doers have inspired the 

 ri"-ht-doers with somethin"; of their sentiments, and coerced them, as 

 auxiliaries, into their service. A feeling almost universally prevails 

 throughout the Colleges and Schools of our country, that the students, 

 in each Institution, constitute of themselves a kind of corporation ; 

 and that corporation is bound to protect and defend, with the united 

 force of the whole body, any individual member who may be in peril 

 of discipline, although the peril may have been incurred by his own 

 misconduct. If then, there is a corporation bound together by sup- 

 posed collective interest, it is certain that this body will have its 

 laws ; and, as laws will be inefficacious without penalties, it will 

 have its penalties also. These laws, by those who are proud to up- 

 hold and prompt to vindicate them, are called the " Code of Honor,'' — 

 a name which at once arouses the attention and attracts the sym- 

 pathies of ardent and ingenuous youth. Being unwritten laws, with 

 undefined penalties, both law and penalty will, at all times, be just 

 what their framers and executors choose to make them. But un- 



