DESCRIBES UNIVERSITY LIFE OF MIDDLE AGES

Money, clothing, books, companionship, and good cheer played as important a part in the life of the mediaeval college student as they do in the life of the average college student of today, according to Professor Charles Homer Haskins, Dean of the Graduate Schools of Arts and Sciences, in his lecture yesterday at the New Lecture Hall on "The Mediaeval Student".

"Universities, like cathedrals, are a product of the Middle Ages," Professor Haskins stated in the opening remarks of his lecture. "Nothing of that type now thriving ever existed in Rome or Greece." He then contrasted the mediaeval and modern universities by showing that such attractions as athletics, journalism, dramatics, public speaking, and other collegiate activities were quite unknown; that the faculty tended toward thorough instruction in religion regardless of the field of concentration; and that education was limited to a very few courses on account of the then recent exit of learning from the monasteries. He called attention to the fact that college curriculums, degrees, and faculties developed in the mediaeval university, creating a system which has outlasted empires.

Much of personal life of students of the middle ages is revealed by student handbooks. Such books, Professor Haskins continued, contain much useless information. Consider the following "Don'ts": "Wash your hands in morning: if time, your face. Don't pick teeth with knife. Don't stare at your neighbor at table. Scrape bones with your knife, don't gnaw them: when done with bones, put them in bowl or on floor."

Preachers of the time found it most provoking and discouraging that men would study law (the classes of which met in the afternoon), for the sole purpose of sleeping in the morning.

Most interesting of all. Professor Haskins found to be the personal letters of student to father or father to student. Requests for money predominated the letters addressed to fathers. In fact, rhetoricians made a respectable income by writing for students letters guaranteed to arouse compassion. One student added at the end of his letter. "Without Ceres and Bacchus, Apollo grows cold," while another wrote that the messenger from home bringing money had been robbed.

Good and virtuous students of that day fined professors whenever they cut a lecture. Professor Haskins concluded that what interested students of the middle ages interests the student of today; that although conditions may differ, collegiate problems are still the same; and finally that the entire system of today is the result of centuries of work.