Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/215

 out from opportunities for social training and social pleasures is making a grave mistake. The college that without making an effort to change matters allows its social life to be restricted and controlled by a small group of social butterflies is committing a crime. I am sure that in the large institutions of which we regularly read in the newspapers, the alleged social dissipations, accounts of which are constantly making the front page, are indulged in by a very small per cent. of the whole body of undergraduates. It is the social aristocrat of whom, thank heaven, there are not many, who dominates and controls the social life of every college with which I am familiar, to the exclusion of the great body of students who most need the training which comes from such an experience. There are in every college scores or hundreds of young men and women who are too shy and too inexperienced to form a social world of their own, whose social instincts are being repressed, who are being shut out from the life which should be freely open to them, and who are starving for a normal social life. College authorities should be wide enough awake to see the situation and to meet it, the social autocracies in college should be overthrown, and every undergraduate should be offered a fair chance for social training and social education.