048
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Title
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048
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Transcription
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many brilliant contest. Outside of that, we devoted our time to our studies, to any outside work that we may have had, and to the interests of the literary societies, with an intensity of concentration that I am sure would make a present-day professor's eyes stand out in amazement. We were everlastingly discussing questions like the tariff, the Nicaraguan canal and the immortality of the soul. When the suffrage question came to a vote in 1882, we lined up on opposite sides not only said everything that had been put forward on the question, but after the amendment was beaten got up a respectable riot when the antis started to bury a coffin said to contain the remains of Susan B. Anthony, only to lose it to the beefier suffs. That near riot was on the whole a very satisfactory affair. We had the band out, and made a big fire on the dirt road at Eleventh and O streets and rowed around so much like real students that we all felt very much encouraged about our rising college spirit. If we could only get a football team and some fraternities started we might at last put the University on the map!
The elective system had not been established in 1880. One could not hop from course to course or from class to class. As a freshman, I recited at 9:00 o'clock every morning except Saturday in mathematics, at 10:00 in history and at 11:00 in languages. No afternoon classes were scheduled. With three hours of recitation, we were expected to give six hours in preparation. That meant nine hours of steady work every day for five days each week. Usually the studying was done at specified hours. The result was that students systematized their work in a way that is not possible in the modern hit or miss elective system. This orderly arrangement of time made it possible do the outside work that was regularly done among the more prominent students. A man who did not have a horse to curry or a church to sweep out, or a newspaper route to carry, felt that he could take an extra study or two and thus shorten up his course and perhaps spend a term now and then in teaching school, in order to acquire a little ready cash.
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Rights
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