The Moral Condition of College Students
By Editor
and out through fast living;' and much more to the same effect. The investigator, after much inquiry, numerous observations, and examination of reports, gives the following estimates, which he believes to be 'as accurate as any figures could be short of two or three years of the most painstaking investigation:' On the basis of 100 students: - Who drink liquor of some kind in freshman year, 90 per cent.
- Who drink liquor of some kind in senior year, 95 per cent.
- Who combine in mild degree wine and bad women, 65 per cent.
- Who drink heavily, 35 per cent.
- Who have two or three 'bats' a year also, 45 per cent.
- Who go irretrievably to the bad (drunkards), 15 per cent.
Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, differ only in degree from Harvard, some not quite so bad, some worse. Dr. David Starr Jordan, of Stanford University, in a lecture before the University Club, Chicago, is quoted: "One time we celebrated a great football victory. Two hundred students from the University of California spent the night on the campus. The fraternity houses were open all night. Two hundred drunken rowdies marched through the library. . . . Beer kegs were carried over the steps of the sorority house, and some of the boys made a night of it there. Later one student went to a saloon downtown, got drunk, got into the wrong house. Some one shot him." Dr. Jordan believes there is no excuse for such a system. Who can believe it? The investigator closes his report, 'Apparently a young man can not get any standing in college unless he is a degenerate.' Mr. Crane says, 'This is a harsher criticism of college life and its evil effects than any I have ever made, yet it comes from one who knows it at first hand. One instinctively hates to believe it true, yet a perusal of the report forces one to believe that it is true.' This paper is published by a people who believe in the training, the education, of the whole man, morally, mentally, physically, with the moral, the spiritual, the religious element dominant. Is there not need of it? We plead with parents to learn where they are sending their boys and girls. Better a thousand times an eighth grade education with character, than a college degree with degradation.