COLLEGE JOURNALISM GOOD FOR EDUCATORS

The following excerpts discussing the two kinds of college newspapers are taken from an article in the current number of the Nation. The national weekly set Mr. Norman Student the task of investigating more than 400 college newspapers throughout the country. Among those classified either as bulletins or journals of opinion was the Crimson.

Undergraduate journalism is not the pale growth of a few years ago. A new and healthy spirit is manifest in many college papers. No subject is now taboo that affects the interest of the learners and no college official is immune from criticism and publicity.

More than four hundred college papers are published in America. Almost every student body supports one, from the tiny four page weekly of the rural college to the complete imitation metropolitan daily in the big university. The Daily Illinois, University of Illinois, for instance, serves a community of 30,000 as the only morning paper and is printed in a university-owned plant valued at $100,000. These papers from laboratories for countless schools of journalism and furnish occupation for scores of students.

Undergraduate papers fall into two groups: the bulletin boards and the journals of opinion. The bulletin boards are harmless sheets packed full of college gossip. Criticism of the University is seldom ventured. The editorials exhort the students to Back the Team, warn freshmen of the evil consequences of Walking on the Grass, and advise the use of Better English.

Products of a new spirit of questioning rampant in undergraduate life, the journals of opinion strike an alien note, jarring to deans and presidents. Besides purveying news items they provoke student opinion on vital subjects and jealously guard the undergraduate interests.

Harvard furnished the first striking example of the new journalism in action. In 1924 the CRIMSON was the first to point out the official neglect of Professor George P. Baker's famous '47, Workshop. As the CRIMSON stated, the university officials permitted the Business School to get five million dollars, while "Professor Baker was actually forbidden to raise money." The CRIMSON lost the fight -- Professor Baker left for Yale--but a note was struck in college journalism that has since been echoed in many a college.

In the spring of 1925 things began to happen in the colleges. First of all, a widespread chapel revolt, broke loose. Paper after paper, from Yale to the University of Southern California, took up the issue. Phrases like this were flaunted under the noses of the deans: "Religious compulsion is a contradiction in terms. . . ." "You can beat a student to his knees, but you cannot make him pray." "We have a body of men who go to chapel under protest to sleep, read, or merely to sit in bovine passiveness while the choir sings and the leader reads and prays." So effective was the agitation that three student bodies voted against required chapel in the fall of 1925. . . .

This is the status of the new journalism in the colleges: On the one hand an increasing group of young editors bent upon securing a greater measure of freedom of expression; on the other an equally determined army of presidents, faculty members, and reactionary alumni determined that open and frank student treatment of controversial topics be stopped at all costs.