Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/186

 182 ability is limited, but who is conspicuous in athletics and personally popular, yields to temptation in the examination room, or otherwise resorts to fraud in order to win scholastic credit. He is shielded by the members of his fraternity, and their influence is such as to prevent his indictment before the college court even if his offense is repeated several times. At last he is caught by some professor through internal evidence in an examination paper. He denies his guilt and his friends join him in the effort to make conviction impossible. The evidence is overwhelming and he must go. The loss of a leader on the athletic field is bewailed as a calamity to the athletic interests of the college, and a stay is secured on some technicality by which the dishonest athlete is retained until the close of the football or baseball season. He then goes, not in disgrace, but with every manifestation of regret on the part of admiring friends. Resentment is felt and openly expressed against the tactless professor whose abnormal conscience has made him expose the athlete's moral weakness. Of what importance is scholastic accuracy in comparison with victory in athletics? Why can not professors exercise more common sense and overlook the shortcomings of those whose athletic success advertises the college among young men more in one day than the professors can do in a year? Is college spirit to be disregarded in deference to out-of-date aphorisms about telling the truth? Has a student no right of mental reservation in signing an examination pledge when he has been unselfishly giving to athletics most of the time needed to prepare for examination? It is all well enough to insist upon the honor system when competing for honors, but why not give a chance to the fellow who wants merely to stay in college, to shine in young society and to help support all college enterprises?

The dominance of athletics as a factor in college life constitutes to-day one of the most serious obstacles to the maintenance of the honor system in colleges. The difficulty of maintaining clean athletics is notorious. So strenuous is the demand for victory that honor must go if it is accompanied with the danger of defeat. The Jesuitic claim that the end justifies the means is continually made under various forms of disguise, and its reacting influence on the ethics of the classroom is inevitable. In an institution where the honor system is in force the football team is made up of young men whose examination pledges are respected. But in an intercollegiate match this team is called upon to meet competitors from a distance, and the code of ethics is changed to provide for the trickery and disguised professionalism in which the strangers are known to indulge. The honor system is reserved for application at home, but elsewhere the athletic organism must adapt itself to its environment. Cheating becomes allowable because it has been found impossible to exclude it from athletic contests. If the devil must be fought it is soon agreed that he shall be