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Show Transfer Student The Wandering Scholar The era of died in the wool loyalty to college almamaters is slowly fading. It is disappearing in the wake of a change in higher education. Thirty years ago Freshmen and sophomores sopho-mores were reared with clenched fists on the football field, snorting and whooping it up in a contest to capture a prize which was sported as a badge of victory for the school year. Today, no junior would get grass stains on his levis for a chance to joust with a freshman. Utah supporters do not grab their Aggie opponents by the neck or misty eyed sentiment. senti-ment. In a word universities are aimed at creating intellects and not at building hearty moral leaders. ' Students detachment is considered by administrators to be a factor in the increase of transfers which deluge admission ad-mission offices regularly. In fact, two-thirds of the sophomore class at a high ranking men's college said m a campus survey of 1939 that they had thoughts of transferring. trans-ferring. To some alumni steeped in the traditions of the past, divorcing one's self from a university to attend another college is scandalous. Many undergraduates disillusioned with college life take to wandering from institution to institution. College catalogues may be partly to blame. Actually they are as conventional as a political platform and say nothing to offend anybody. Most universities print a bulletin full of usefull facts listing faculty and courses. Few actually describe what is most important: the campus life. Colleges have been defended for not printing a more accurate ac-curate interpretation of their campuses because of the complexity com-plexity of a university. Others guess that even if the campuses camp-uses had a accurate picture of themselves they would not print it because they want to turn into something better. Distraught professors and dismayed alumni who cannot understand why a student would leave his almamater are given reasons of money, love, curriculm and boredom as frequent pretexts for transfer. ! Most administrators stand pat on the principle that students stu-dents ought to attend only on,e college', he should choose wisely and stay. One professor wrote in a campus newspaper: news-paper: "In my day it did not occur to us, when unhappy, to withdraw from college to 'find ourselves.' We wer.e inclined, in-clined, rather, to stay put till we had made something out of ourselves worth finding.'' Abraham Flexner, the great educational administrator and critic, greatly admired the German university for its method of continual transfer on the part of the students. He wrote, "The loyalty which marks the Harvard man in the United States, the Oxford man in England is unknown in Germany. The advantage to this attitude is that it enables the able student to up where his subject is most vigorously prosecuted, and it stimulates the professor to do his best in order to attract the most competent students. The tendency towards intellectualism and specialism and the growing transfer movement are probably associated. But as Richard M. Gummere, Jr., director of admissions . at Bard College, asked, "Is our geographic mobility as a nation a permanent habit? If there we're educational value to transfer, wandering scholar could be a rich asset bettering their own studies while cross-fertilizing the academic garden. |