In itself this is good evidence of the University's success as a center
of education; but these increasing throngs of students bring many
difficult problems, not the least of which is the necessity of finding
an adequate supply of teachers, class rooms, and laboratories. Equally,
life in the University becomes more complicated. The ideal simplicity of
academic life, the intimate contact between fellow-students and between
students and Faculties, is all too easily lost in the leveling
tendencies which numbers make inevitable. This is the great danger of
the large University--but a peril that has been recognized and has been
met with at least some degree of success.
The student organizations, fraternities, and clubs, which have
multiplied to so remarkable a degree, are perhaps the first and most
important student reaction. Many if not most of these organizations have
some connection with individual Faculty members, either through alumni
on the Faculty or through honorary members, and this forms a basis at
least for some extra class-room relationship. Sometimes, on occasion, a
certain restraint on the part of the Faculty becomes inevitable, and the
establishment of a Committee on Student Affairs, originally a committee
on "non-athletic" relations, created some fifteen years ago, has
resulted. This committee has accomplished much towards directing student
activities into proper and worthwhile channels, though the ghost of the
classic charge of unwelcome paternalism arises occasionally. The only
answer necessary is the evident improvement in the general standards of
all student organizations and the mere fact that they have, for the most
part, continued to exist through several student generations; no little
accomplishment in itself, when one remembers the almost automatic rise
and fall of these societies in the early days.
If the University and particularly the Faculty has been concerned with
these problems, incident upon the University's growth, so have the
students themselves. They have seen the necessity for constructive
effort and have established such agencies as the Student Council and the
Inter-fraternity Council among the men, and the corresponding Judiciary
Council and Pan-Hellenic Association among the women. Above all, the
University has profited by the two great organizations which have been
the most effective expression of student life and ideals,--the Michigan
Union and the Women's League.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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