Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/127

 All this is not so simple nor so innocent as it might at first seem. In an institution that numbers its students by the thousands any man in prominence in undergraduate activities is responsible directly or indirectly for the expenditure of considerable sums of money. In any one of a score of our prominent institutions, for instance, the chairman of the committee in charge of any large dance, conservatively speaking, has control of the expenditure of at least a thousand dollars. The chairman of the senior invitation committee last year at the University of Illinois expended two or three thousand dollars. The manager of a modern college daily may easily have pass through his hands during one year eight or ten thousand dollars, and in most cases these officers are appointed by the class president or elected by undergraduate vote. Often, then, appointments come purely as rewards for political loyalty, for standing by the candidate for office. More often than otherwise such positions are plums thrown down to the friends below who have given the aspirant for office a leg up the political tree. The amount of money which in these days is directly under the control of the college politician is rather startling when we come to sum up the total. Its control, it is true, is not infrequently reasonably well by college rules and college supervision, but even the most careful supervision has its loopholes which the shrewd undergraduate is not slow to discover, and not always averse to slipping through.

It is the man in control of undergraduate affairs, too, who ultimately makes customs, who establishes traditions, who determines ideals, good or bad, for