Repository: UIHistories Project: Booklet - Citizenship at UI (1929) [PAGE 14]

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with. (The hourly march-past of 10,000 at class inten I doc not you see, include the whole university student body living in Uroana-Champaign nor any of the 1,400 students enrolled inith< university's colleges of medicine, dentistry and pharmacy in Chicago ) He knows—none better—all the inspiring and all the wearing phases of the task of drilling common sense into potential geniuses, the task of giving the right direction to talent, the task of making something of mediocrity, the task of controlling the lawless and the impetuous without putting them in jail or on bread and water, the task of inspiriting the timid : the many sided task, in short, of running a vast machine that must run with the precision of a delicately attuned machine and still shall not be a machine, but shall stand in loco parentis to 12.000 children away from home—fresh, gabby, o'er confident children, to say nothing of a faculty of nearly 1,200 adults among whom is thinevitable proportion of the pompous, the fantastic, and the hal baked. Without The glory of the Kinley decade at Urbana-Champaign is that the University of Illinois has been fatherly without being grossly paternalistic. It has exercised a firm and searching supervision without indecent espionage. It has put the student body through the laboratory with the same particularity that it has put the agricultural soil of Illinois through the laboratory. It knows it children down to the decimals. It knows that one of its problems is the overcrowding of students in private \oc. ings and that such crowding hurts scholarships. It did not, in that matter accept an impression as a fact. It made tests and discovered that in a selected group of students the average of :holarship o those living two in a room was 3.22. of those living three n room was 3.08. while the average of those living foul n a room which from the hygienic point of view alone in llou is 3.04. Where Wilful Children Win Before some indecorums—such as miss in her 'teens nokii at restaurant tables or in the booths of soft drink pai rs overlooking the campus—the university has lain down. It hi: down because it knew that it could not com t the iml. 01 without an amount of clamor and intrusion and h< torinc all proportion to mischief involved But before the student ,vned u,d student driven automobile the university has no. lam down. There t h e m i s c h i e f amounted to moral peril and justified emphatic measun

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