049
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Title
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049
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Transcription
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A glance at my old student scrap book shows that a steady development took place during the entire six years, but that the University was still a small and provincial and old fashioned college at the end of this period. Public affairs consisted almost exclusively of literary society meetings, oratorical and debating contests and commencement exercises and "exhibitions." Two or three fraternities were finally established, leading to the famous fight which culminated in the fall of 1884 in the action denying membership in the literary societies to the Greek letter brethren. In the forty years in which I have watched the University no student battle was fought with greater bitterness or with more public spirit or ability than this effort to stem the tide of modernity in the social life of the college. It resulted in the retirement of the Greeks from the Palladian and Union societies and their organization of the Philodocean, where they made good the "barbarian" charge that fraternities and literary societies could not flourish with an identical membership.
For a few years after this battle the old fashioned societies held their own. During this era the state was growing fast. Boys with spending money above their bare necessities were no longer rare on the campus. We managed to organize a baseball team, to acquire a college yell, to take on the elective system of studies, and to start a second building, the old chemical laboratory. While everything in the state had a forward look in those years, the change to modern state university conditions did not begin to come in earnest until the close of the decade. In my days we were still poor but honest. Our clothes may have been patched but they were scrupulously clean. We prided ourselves on having true hearts, even if our manners must have been frightfully crude. The number of successful marriages growing out of the simple social customs of the early times is worthy of remark. The "slate" may have had something to do with this condition. In each literary society a list of the young lady members was made out weekly and every man was given an opportunity to sign his initials after the one of his choice. This "scratching of
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Rights
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