Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/214

 cially nervous girls to encourage the friendship of a solider and a less showy man, for fear they will have less social excitement and fewer opportunities to make social engagements. The popular girl and: the fusser in college are both of a piece and together do much to spread a false idea of what the actual social life is of the average young person in college; both should be eliminated wherever it is possible.

The fusser in college is a social menace. His purpose in enrolling as an undergraduate is not to accomplish really good honest college work; the college is for him simply the theater in which he is to have a chance to stage a little social drama in which he will be the star actor. He wants to professionalize and commercialize the social life of college. All he sees in it is an opportunity to make money or to have a regular and continuous good time.

"I don't expect my son to do much work in college," a foolish father said to me a few years ago. "I want him to have a little social life, to enjoy himself, to acquire polish. He'll get plenty of chance to work after he leaves college."

"And he'll probably leave college very quickly," I added, for the man whose object in being in college is to get into society, very soon lags behind intellectually and either withdraws of his own volition, or is sent away. The man who gets no social training in college is missing one of the most important byproducts of college life, but the man who gets little or nothing else has wasted his undergraduate years.

The college that does not concern itself with the social life of its students, that does not in some way control or direct that life so that no one will be shut