FACT, FANCY AND OPINION

Behind the recurring cry against the college press for its paucity of sound opinion on college subjects there is a false assumption which weakens the claim. If educators, magazine writers and college editors themselves lament the lack of judgment displayed by undergraduate journals in a crisis, they are assuming that the opinion of student editors has a definite value. It is a rare thing for the opinion of a student editor to be worth more than that of any undergraduate, and this latter kind of opinion is worth very little.

It has been pointed out before in these columns that only the privilege of print separates the college editor from his non-journalistic contemporary. But if the oneness of the undergraduate mind is admitted, where is its title to an opinion? It is a common error to suppose that association with a set of circumstances brings the right to judge fitness or unfitness. But nowhere is this belief less true than in an undergraduate body.

The average student has no true opinions of his own because he has no knowledge of the objects of opinion. What he thinks he knows about his college is too often only a series of impressions and images which have become grouped about certain aspects of college life. The word "football" brings to mind one set of images; the sight of a text book or the tolling of the chapel bell, another. As a general rule, the pictures made in his head do not correspond in more than the slightest degree to reality.

Even the college editors, well-informed as they are supposed to be, suffer from the same handicap of having only faulty images on which to base what they will say. The fault is, of course, not peculiar to college students; what is called public opinion is built on a foundation as shaky. Neither should the blame lie wholly on the undergraduates; in most universities there are conditions which keep from the student intimate knowledge of events. But where opinion can be based only on impressions it will never have more than a transitory value.