The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Taking the Stranger in
EVERY spring at Inter-scholastic the University community is overrun with high school boys most of whom see for the first time a great University and get their first impressions of what they suppose is real college life. They come here for a good time, and it is up to us to give it to them, even if we have to take to the bath tub as a sleeping place or curl up on the soft side of the library table while our guests are resting comfortably on our Ostermoors. That's part of the penalty of being a good fellow.
But these boys are here to be educated. They'll see the armory and the sorority houses, and the Gymnasium and the Stock Pavilion, and the Woman's Building and the regiment, and the ball games and the Illio and the circus; and seeing the circus last they are likely to go away with the impression that college life is a sort of glorified Orpheum show mixed up with a little athletics and a beauty section—that the whole thing is a continuous circus in which no one really works but the janitor and the spot-light man. They seldom see the work that is undone, the problems that are unsolved, the papers that are unwritten, and the books that are crying to be read, and know nothing of the regular grind of college life—of the horrible scramble to catch up that begins, in spite of tired muscles and racked nerves, almost before the door is closed upon their departure. At home they have heard little of college life excepting of its escapades; here they are likely to see little but its exaggerated diversions. And so in the exuberance of youth, in the desire to entertain, actually and metaphorically, we take these strangers in. We give them an entirely erroneous idea of real college life and of the daily routine of work which forms the major part of undergraduate existence. Sometimes, too, in a misguided effort to let these children see it all and to gratify morbid curiosity the enthusiastic host yields to the pressure to show up the baser side of undergraduate life, and sends the prospective freshman home with lowered ideals.
College life is not all fussing, and Fatimas, vaudeville, and athletic victories; it is in fact at its best very largely hard work and serious thought, and demands a man's best efforts. Why not show these high school boys, then, the laboratories and the drawing rooms where the fellows do real work; why not show them the Y. M. C. A. and take them on Sunday to hear a good sermon from one of the student pastors? Why not leave a few books lying around to suggest that the real college man does pretty regularly work and that college is not all a frolic? Otherwise when he gets into college next fall or later and finds out what the real situation is he will probably say to himself bitterly and not piously, "I was a stranger, and you took me in."
May