Food for Thought
January was pregnant with food for undergraduate thought provided by stimulating speakers, appearing under the auspices of the Round Table, the Arts and other organizations.
Professor Fred Lewis Pattee '88, now Professor of American Literature at Pennsylvania State College, struck a pessimistic note at the annual banquet of the local chapter of Phi Beta Kappa when he declared: "As I look into the future of American Literature, I see brilliant genius flickering for a moment, and then dying, thwarted and disillusioned. Is not all our literary power today turning towards journalism of literature? What men of power have we who are writing down to the mass ?"
"There is developing on this campus an ideal in which physical vigor is wedded in intellectual vigor," declared Professor Mecklin of the sociology department before the Round Table, speaking after a study of behavior patterns within the Ccfllege. There is a fusion going on, he said, between an old pioneer individuality and a newer intellectual independence which is giving balance as answer to the problem of being an individualist while living in a society such as the College. The question of the moment, according to Professor Mecklin, is not whether individuality is achieved by opposing the institution, but how far the individual must make use of the institution in developing personality.
As a sort of guiding code for social contacts, he offered the following: "Be slow about forming opinions. Exercise a wise reserve in the expression of your opinions. Exercise a wise tardiness in putting your ideas into practice. If you are in a community or connected with an institution where you are very much in the minority, defer to the opinion of the majority, while maintaining with dignity and sobriety your own. Never permit your ideas of matters of abstract truth and right to be dominated by the belief of the majority. This is perhaps the most difficult task of all."
In the person of Monsieur Champion, French bookseller and literateur, Le Cercle Francais brought to the College a man who admirably presented the life and influence of Anatole France upon whom he was exceptionally well versed.
Floyd Dell, contemporary novelist, views the present generation as sufferers from a tremendous shock in the form of the World War and its aftermath. Youth's pretty patterns of life were shattered and out of this grew "an enormous cynicism and skepticism.". The result, he continued, is that present day youth refuse to believe anything at all. Books, in the opinion of Mr. Dell, are the instruments for providing new patterns and a new appreciation and interpretation of life which is badly needed.
Those who have taken Sociology 1 and have clung to the notion, justly or otherwise, that the Nordic race of blonde beasts were inherently superior, received a severe jolt as John Langdon Davies, English scientist and lecturer on anthropological subjects, exploded the "Nordic Myth". "There are absolutely no racial differences, physical or mental, between the races as far as scientists have been able to discover", he asserted. "There is no great nation on the earth which has any purity of racial type. All are mongrel. There are no thoroughbreds of racial type to be found anywhere."
