Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/190

 "If you have had him here for nineteen years and have done nothing for him, how can you expect us to reorganize him in six months?" I inquired.

"I thought you were able to do everything in college," he replied. But we are not.

I have found the greatest interest as an executive officer in college in getting the peculiar viewpoint of the loafer. When I call him for irregularity, and if I am shrewd enough to prove to him that these excuses which he has offered were not thought sufficient on his part to keep him from certain social pleasures in which I have seen him indulging, he leans upon the prop of all loafers and asserts that the rules of the college permit a certain number of cuts to all students, and he has not yet exceeded his limit. "Anyway," he goes on, "a fellow can't go to class all the time." One of the most common excuses of the loafer for not attending class is that of not being wakened in time by the proper person. I have a letter now on my desk from a young fellow dropped from college for poor work who says: "A good deal of my trouble was due to the ineffective waking system in our house," meaning that the freshman whose duty it was to come around and wake him up, sometimes went to sleep at the switch. The next most popular excuse for absence is that he was busy studying for another course than the one he cut. It never seems to occur to him that there are regular hours of study far more than adequate for the purposes of even the good student, and that it is seldom if ever necessary to cut class in order to study. Cutting class with him is a habit as regular and as persistent as smoking, for every loafer smokes.