Editor’s note: This editorial ran in the Oregon Daily Emerald the day after the University Student Body Council announced that freshmen would be expected to continue the tradition of wearing green caps as part of initiation, and those who violated the rule would be punished every Thursday at 10:50 a.m. on the Library steps, “under the auspices of the Order of the ‘O.’”
It is the strange and somewhat pathetic duty of the Emerald to inform the students of the University, after years in which they might have found out for themselves by walking across the campus, that Oregon is to have traditions.
The student council says so. And, by golly, what the student council says goes — sometimes.
As the discerning reader will perceive elsewhere in the columns of this morning’s Emerald, the student council yesterday made up its mind — or perhaps the word “decided” is more appropriate for the operation which it underwent — to re-establish freshman paddling on the library steps. Traditions which are so useless that they can’t live from their own strength will be tenderly nourished by use of the oaken barrel stave.
Now, of course, we admit that the student council must have something to do. The first official meeting of the newly elected group was held yesterday — and should the organization find nothing whatever to occupy its time, nothing even for one meeting, someone might criticize. Someone might even be tempted to suggest the abolition of the student council. And then what would campus politics and campus politicians do? Oh, horrors!
The Emerald does not frown on traditions merely because they are traditions. What the Emerald dislikes is to see college students who are old enough to know better try to enforce silly customs which would die a most gentlemanly death were they allowed to do so in peace.
The “hello” tradition has not perished. It will subsist without hothouse nursing. The chances are that there always will be a sufficient number of socialized students on the campus to maintain the “hello” tradition. But if anyone does not want to say “hello,” it’s his own business; and the Emerald fears, despite the good intentions of the student council, that a paddle more or less won’t make much difference.
The public humiliation of freshmen, a nice bit
of barbarism, was abolished in recent years by some partially civilized student council, but presto! a rub of Aladdin’s lamp and the evil genii
is back again.
And the sad fact of it all is this writer, a member of the worthy body — long may it live — could not be present at the meeting wherein these students, whom the freshmen helped to elect, evolved, by reversion to type, this scheme for the spiritual welfare of the ignorant frosh. But let it be known, if he had been there, he should have raised his lust voice — not to say musical — in a howl, loud and long, that should have been heard from Spencer’s Butte to Hendricks Park.