He Came, He Saw--

The undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin are very much annoyed by the successful detective methods of Prof. Scott H. Goodnight, the dean of men. The incident occurred on Dec. 7, but the controversy was not precipitated until another member of the faculty. Prof. William Ellery Leonard, recently made public a letter which he had written to President Glenn Frank criticising the dean's procedure. The dean, it seems, heard that one of the girl students was spending the night in an apartment occupied by her flance, also a student. He went to the apartment early the next morning and found the couple there. They were asked to leave the university. They-did so, and during the Christmas holidays they were married. Prof. Leonard, in his letter, declared that Dean Goodnight's espionage was beneath the dignity of the office which he holds.

The resultant discussion on the campus--and one can imagine how the tongues must have wagged!--initiated a movement to confine the authority of the deans to purely academic matters, removing their power to interfere with the morals and deportment of the students. No doubt the students would enjoy this change in a traditional policy of universities, but we doubt that their parents would. Too many, boys and girls now go to college on the theory that students lead a happy, carefree existence, unfettered by the responsibilities and conventions of ordinary life. As we have occasionally observed in discussing athletics, educating men and women is the sole obligation of an educational institution. One has difficulty in discerning how such a loosening of disciplinary control would encourage a deeper devotion to studies. Boston Herald.