1903-04 Volume 28 No 1–5 - Phi Delta Theta Scroll Archive

i6o THE SCROLL.faculty or corporation, shaping the future of the university.Is he not entitled to do some shaping six months before theribboned parchment?College customs established by mass meeting may lookqueerto alumni. Whether they are wise or not will dependon whether they really work in the interest of order or ofanarchy. If they are established in order to be violated,they will speedily be abolished. But if they mean simplywilling recognition that those who have been for years onour campus have the right and duty to advise new-comers,they mean the truth.Upper classmen can preserve ancient traditions when theyare good, and hand them down to their academic posterity.Upper classmen can stiffen the spinal column of many awobbling freshman, and teach him the meaning of KipUng's'Mind you keep your rifle and yourself jus' so.'Many a senior or junior has taken an irresponsible newcomeras a roommate out of sheer brotherly kindness, andtrained him till he could go alone. He has taken the boywho was tempted to think that a ten-cent magazine wasliterature and a ten-cent show is the drama, and made himfeel that cheap and vulgar pabulum means a cheap and vulgarmind. Again and again some of our fraternities havesteadied and coached their younger members and savedthem from disaster, and a fraternity that does not habituallydo this has no right to exist among us. An organizationwith no sense of responsibility is an organization for whichthe university declines to be responsible.Upper classmen can give to the narrow man, whosehorizon has been the village street, a wider outlook and alarger sympathy. It has been happily said of Abram .S.Hewitt that he had a 'national mind.' No eastern mancan have this unless he has associated with western men.The man who has never (mentally) lived outside of NewEngland is essentially provincial, and his judgment on nationalissues unsound. There is no more striking provincialismthan that of men who have lived all their lives on ManhattanIsland, and whose ideas of Boston, Philadelphia, andChicago are derived from the comic papers. The northernboy needs to meet the southerner—the son of the abolitionistneeds to know the son of the Confederate general. Halfthe benefit of college life comes from being shaken up to-