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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 4, 1923)
OREGON SUNDAY EMERALD Member of Pacific Intercollegiate Press Association_ Kenneth Youel, Editor_Lyle Jam, Manager Official publication of the Associated Students of the University of Oregon, issued daily except Monday, during the college year. _ ] ERNEST HAYCOX, Sunday Editor_ George H. Godfrey, Managing Editor.Marvin Blaha, Associate Editor Features: Jessie Thompson, Earl Voorhiea, Katherine Watson, Arthur Budd, Edwin Fraser, Ep Hoyt, Margaret Skarlan, Francis Linklater, Katherine Spall. General Writers: Clinton Howard, Eddie Smith, Bachael Chezem. The Zest of Living! Exactly at 11:50 a. in. the bell rang and the class made a collective and vicious rush to the door. Paul Flickem, a noble senior, still slum bered peacefully on. A frosh, in going by, turned over a chair and this chair acted as our gentle hero’s alarm clock. He opened his eyes, came wandering back from fields of Elysian clover to a barn like room bordered by funereal blackboards. After a period of meditation he untangled his two feet from the three or four adjacent chairs, collected his notebook—a singular testimony of his unquench able optimism!—and made for the door. The fresh air revived him; taking a deep breath he recited this day’s bit of inspiring literachoor: “Day by day, in very way, I’m getting better and better.” Then Paul sighed. “Trouble is,” he added, “I’m getting so good that the prof will flunk me. It must irritate him to see me get the slumber he should have, judging from his tired manner of speech.” He walked forty feet and uttered this further gem: “Every ad ditional day I stay in this school I get less mentally active. Once, when a frosh, I thought knowledge was intrinsically worth snaring. Heaven forfend! How 1 shudder at the thought now! I don’t want knowledge; I want to get away from here!” And by this statement Paul became the prophet and spokesman forevermore of a growing and infinitely weary aggregation of fourth and fifth year seniors. It, may sound like heresy, it may be the sign ot sloth and indolence, it may mean that some of us do not belong to the beatific band of “mental aristocrats”; but that does not change the essential mental and physical fact that for a group of us—and not a small group either—the little fatigue jiggers are slowing our movements and snapping our energy. With all due deference to the scholastic system it is so arranged that we are bombarded daily by a reiterated series of facts and form ulas which at times seem to have no variety, no ending, no freshness, no significance, no value. This editorial is not the expression of a passing mood; it is the reflection of Paul Plickem’s statement, heard time and time again on this campus, over a period of two years; ever since we became aware of the fact that upperclassmen existed. Now here: if the constituted authorities prune down the athletic program, if they sweep out all activities, if they curtail social func tions to what do they expect the student’s energy and restlessness and enthusiasm will fasten? Studies? Not on your life, will the student’s whole enthusiasm and his whole energy divert itself. With few grateful exceptions the courses on this campus are not so organized and taught as to enlist any flar ing interest. There isn’t enough leaven in them. They don’t link up closely enough with tin' urges and desires and questions which every student carries about with him and for which he seeks an answer. Let’s make a concrete case of what we mean: Last year and for a term this fall we had a man on the campus who carried about with him the sense of having always a good time; who seemed to haye found the secret of both being happy and doing good work; who. by his zest and his method, enlisted an enthusiastic following. Tie had his faults, but he was, in a certain sense, a huge and re freshing oasis in a pretty arid day of classes. We no longer have him. “Getting By” By Clinton Howard It rather looks as if “getting by” were becoming the popular ernze of the ilny, in the college worlil. Pressure of studies a ml “activities” on the poor little old twenty four hours a day have placed the supreme emphasis in college on “getting by”; convention demands it, and as for anything like a poor attempt to think, it is regarded as an 1 impractical and dreamy occupation. Brains in college are becoming a scarce article, from very lack of use: we come to college and the whole em phasis of o'lir four, years is unconscious ly and sometimes involuntarily thrown upon activities which are after all only* miniature reflections of what can just as well be done by us in the outside world on the original scale and without the benefit of a college "education.” Activities are needed in a college, but after all, the whole is the sum total of its parts, and certainly activ ities are not all of the parts of a col lege career. Lectures by learned and unlearned professors, notetaking and laboratories are needed too in a college, but if they were all there is to a university car eer, we might well dispense with liv ing students who require food, drink, sleep and a health department, and who yield some returns to their civilization,, for these “mercies gratefully received.” If activities and lectures were all to be found in a college career, it would be far cheaper for the state to hire1 phonographs and dictographs to till the class rooms with a corps of really ef ficient business managers to cave for our so important “activities.” Again, if we could all be “leading men” in college activities, the situation might be remedied somewhat, for then ' we would all get about the same amount of experience in the executive ami committee work, which activities , tarnish, and would save us much of the < mortification and character deforma tion which results from our being "lit | tie activiters.” Human nature is contrary. If we . have some° talent for our own pro- t fession, we feel that we should devote 1 only a small amount of energy to its • pursuit, and should spend the rest in • trying to capture the laurel in a half i dozen other activities, in whch we are \ to be classed only as "little activiters” 1 or as errand boys for the successful t men. , The average college man of today is n oo lazy, in all probability, to search t nit his own best bet for success, and :o develop his own talent and special ;y. He prefers to let that wait until le is out of college and at work, and for his college record he is content :o appear in the senior write-ups as the iliputian hanger-on, and the “little ae tiviter,” subsidiary to the successful nan in a half dozen fields foreign to his own talent. And the fact that he is a “little aetiviter” in fields outside of his own pasture fence is about the worst thing which could happen. It makes him into a jack to every successful man in for eign courts and king of none in his own right. The ehances are highly in favor of the fact that if he wore the fresh green of youthful naivete in his freshman year, he will wear the drab yellow-green, common to “jacks in ev ery trade,” at the end of hiB senior year. Of course it hurts our self-pride a little, but then after all, it is easier to be a small squash than finding out for ourselves the very elusive secret of the great man’s success—that he sticks to his own line. Too, we have a sneaking idea that if we did find out the secret of his success, the recipe would call for a good bit of honest down-to-the-ground hard work in reformaiton of ourselves. That cuts the grain crosswise. We’ll drift on o*ir lazy peaceful stream of getting by, probably, until we hit some hard-headed boss uot of the college world who wants to know what colleges taught us and our minds will suddenly go blank. College taught us to get by—or rather we learned it. But what is “getting by” but following the line of least resistance; dubbing the energetic, successful fellow a genius; naming his “method” a divine panacea, and attempting to wear it ourselves like a misfit overcoat. To find the other fellow’s “method” and to absorb it, di gest it, and evolve our own by-way to success is all right, but there are dif ferences between methods and manner isms. To be a success in our own right re quires brains, and that is something we are in danger of losing in this college generation from lack of use, outside of our own shop talk. It’s so much easier to deify the energetic man, to adopt his manners and slang, to bask in his light, and to hide our own feet of clay. Theatres Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sat-1 inlay Norma Talmadge and Eugene; D’Brien will again be seen together in ‘The Voice from the Minaret,” a First National picture, which is coming to the 3astle theatre. These two have won the: ippellation of the perfect screen lovers. Fourteen members of the crew of the whaling schooner used for filming Ben Arnes Williams’ famous story, “All the Brothers Were Valiant,” at the Rexj Monday and Tuesday, were thrown into j :he cold waters of the Pacific when two twenty-foot wlmlo boats' collided) sev eral miles out from San Francisco. Be •ause of their heavy clothing, oilskins md seamen’s boots they were saved only, with difficulty. Henry W. Savage, who has to his credit m the past Such prime successes as the original New York production ot The Prince of Pilsen,” “The College Widow,” ‘Excuse Me,” “Everywoman,” “Madam X,” ‘‘The Girl of the Golden West,” ‘Woodland,” ‘‘Madam Butterfly,” grand opera in English, and the many triumphs of dear, delightful Mitzi in her diarming musical plays, now offers the iitre-goers the crowning effort of his long, and ever reliable managerial ca reer. This spreme success is none other than his entirely new and lavish produc : ion of Franz Lehar’s world-famous oper etta, “The Merry Widow,” which comes soon at tho Heilig. LET’S BE HONEST (Continue*’ from page one) day, but the world today is a failure and we know it’s a failure. Why can’t Universities show a better way?” That is the question Pr. Landsburv has to ask of educators and students alike. Trivial Pleasures Stressed In addition to losing personality and ideals in the unneessary waste of col lege life, lie says, the present genera : ion has lost the old-fashioned virtues >f altruism and service in the seeking if trivial pleasures of a temporary na ure. This seeking of trivial pleasure s a totally different thing, Pr. Lands >urv pointed out, from the legitimate iiirsuit of happiness of a more lasting ; icrt. “Because of the newness of the eoun rv, and other things, such as climate,” ie said, “the Northwest has developed i very line type of young people: but ve are getting awjiy. from the °age of loing things, and are coining to an age if seeking trivial pleasures.” People are dominated, the dean ex dained, by a desire to be amused. They [upend upon a something outside them elves to make fhe time between nee- , ssarv occupations endurable. Educa ion. Pr. l.audsbury feels, should train man to have resources within him- 1 elf; and this it cannot do if a man i nothing but a part of a herd. "We ,ant to be amused, rather than to .■aru to amuse ourselves. B|it noughts of the leisure hour dote ie fate of the individual,” he ared. And mere group-members a resources within themselves to leir leisure hours valuable. Pean Landsburv makes a serious arraignment of college life. He offered I u remedy for the ills of education. “The remedy for the trouble is to substitute in the minds of students the right idea of what is valuable, for the wrong one,” he said. Young people study the wrong things; they special ize too much, in college, and come out, not with educations, but with trades. The old-fashioned humanity studies, Dean Landsbury feels, are the import ant ones toward a broadening educa tion—history, literature, philosophy, psychology, science. “These things give vision; the others are merely trades,” was the way he expressed it. i The question of useless and wasteful activities will settle itself, he feels,; with the substitution of interests of a better sort. It is a wrong understand ing of values that leads to over-empha- ■ I sis of so-called social life, and organ izations. As to activites having ar. important place in the making of Ore gon Spirit—Dr. Landsbury doesn’t be lieve that Oregon Spirit is manufactur ed in that way. “Oregon Spirit is something to hide behind,” he declared energetically. “It is a spirit of .self-righteousness, of praising ourselves. But we are simply realizing on a past investment. Pre vious student bodies built up the thing we call Oregon Spirit, but we are do ing nothing to keep it up.” Por the herd-spirit, Dr. Landsbury asserts, is not the Oregon Spirit, when it means loss of individual personality. NEW CODE OF ETHICS IS SOUGHT FOR WOMEN Something Is Wanted to Make a Deep Impression When Bead Once, Says Dean Straub The contest for a concise yet compre hensive code of ethics for University women is arousing interest among Oregon co-eds. At least one organ ization is already working and a num ber of others have expressed their in tention of working on a code. The contest closes February 24. The code which is in use now does j not express the esprit de corps of the1 women students, thinks Dean Fox. A code is wanted which is more concise and telling. The papers handed in last term were too lengthy. What is wanted is a code which will fit on one side of a postal card, said Dean Straub. “The code should be something like the beatitudes, in which there is not a single superfluous word and from which there has not been omitted a single nec essary word to complete the meaning. “When a prize was offered for the best story describing Christ’s changing the water to wine about one hundred; papers were handed in covering from two to ten pages. The paper which took the prize was handed in by a young lady Sunday-school teacher and read as follows: ‘The conscious waters saw their God and blushed.’ There is not a single superfluous word and yet it is absolutely complete and well rounded,” Dean Straub declared. “What we want is something that when read once will make a deep im pression upon the mind and will never be forgotten; something as striking as the above sentence in referring to the wine.” IDAHO TRYINU TO UBT SUITABLE HONOR CODE U. of Idaho, Feb. 1.—A plan is being worked out whereby the honor system or honor rode, can be adopted by the student body. This plan would provide for the honor system, covering cheat ing, not only during examinations, but all undesirable actions on the campus, and a student council to enforce the system of punishment. The Castle James Oliver Curwood’s ‘JAN OF THE BIG SNOWS’ Red blooding fighting men struggling for life—till but one remembering the honor of the big snows. • COMING— Wednesday, Thursday Friday and Saturday The devine Norma’s most • appealing picture “THE VOICE FROM THE MINARET” • ADMISSION Evenings....30c ALWAYS Matinees....20c Use Emerald Want Ads Fashion Park Clothiers A Portland Storekeeper who was locked in his own telephone booth by a hold-up man, didn't have a nickel in his pocket to call the police. Surprising to see how far a little change goes these days. Change of Hose 35c to $2.00 Change of Shirts $2.00 to $9.00 Change of Belts 75c to $3.00 Change of C41oves $1.50 to 5.00 Change of Ties 50c to $3.00 Change of mind-no charge. New suits—see them. Green Merrell Co. men’s wear “One of Eugene’s best stores” Tuesday February AN INCOMPARABLE COMPANY OF 60 Special Two Big Famous Symphony Carloads Maxim Orchestra of Scenery Beauties PRICES—Floor, 10 rows, $2.50; balance $2.00; balcony, first 3 rows, $2.00; next 3, $1.50; balance $1.00 (plus tax). Seat sale Monday 10 A. M. (Doors open 7:45; curtain 8:25.) MEN I of the Methodist Church What does the church mean to you? Come out Sunday morning and let us talk it over. ALL KINDS of REBUILT TYPEWRITERS To Rent To Sell Cash or Terms OFFICE MACHINERY & SUPPLY CO. 917 Willamette Phone 148 (Over Western Union)