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by any personal influence which he can exert, or by any information which he can impart, prevents the commission of offenses that are meditated, or helps to redress the wrongs already committed; and that he is a bad student, who, by withholding evidence, or by false and evasive testimony, protects offenders and thereby encourages the repetition of offenses; and further, that, as civil society can not attain those ends of peace and prosperity, for which it was constituted, if it should suffer accomplices in crime, or accessories, either before or after the fact, to remain or go at large among its members; so, no College or School can ever reach the noble purposes of its institution, should it permit confederates, or accessories in vice or crime, to remain enrolled among its members.

And, whereas one great object of penal discipline is the reformation of the offender; therefore,

Resolved, That, just in proportion as the students of any Institution will cooperate with its government in maintaining order and good morals, just in the same proportion should the government of such Institution become more lenient and parental, substituting private expostulation for public censure, and healing counsel for wounding punishments.

The Committee appointed at the Convention above named, to prepare an Address to the Faculties of the Colleges above referred to, have attended to the duty assigned them, and submit the following

REPORT.

Unhappily, no person needs to be informed that a feeling of antagonism towards Teachers often exists among Students. The hostile relation of distrust and disobedience supplants the filial one of trust and obedience. Such a relation necessitates more or less of coercive discipline; and discipline, unless when administered in the highest spirit of wisdom and love, alienates rather than attaches. Though it may subdue opposition, it fails to conciliate the affections.

A moment's consideration must convince the most simple-minded, that the idea of a natural hostility between teachers and pupils is not merely wrong, but ruinous. Without sympathy, without mutual affection, between instructors and instructed, many of the noblest purposes of education are wholly baffled and lost. No student can ever learn even the most abstract science from a teacher whom he dislikes as well as from one whom he loves. Affection is an element in which all the faculties of the mind, as well as all the virtues of the heart, flourish.

Springing from this deplorable sentiment of a natural antagonism between teachers and students, an actual belligerent condition ensues between them. One party promulgates laws; the other disobeys them when it dares; or, what is an evil only one degree less in magnitude than actual disobedience, it renders but a formal or compulsory compliance; there being, in strictness, no obedience but that of the heart. One party enjoins duties; the other evades, or grudgingly performs

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them. Prohibitions are clandestinely violated. A rivalry grows up Between the skill and vigilance that would detect, and the skill and vigilance that would evade detection. Authority on the one side and fear on the other, usurp the place of love. Aggression and counteraggression, not friendship and coöperation, become the motives of conduct, and the college or the school is a house divided against itself.

We gladly acknowledge that there are practical limits, both on the side of Faculties and of Students, to these deplorable results. Still, students do bear about a vast amount of suppressed and latent opposition against Faculties and Teachers, which, though never developing itself in overt acts of mutiny or indignity, yet mars the harmony and subtracts from the usefulness of all our educational institutions.

Though all students do not partake of this feeling of hostility towards teachers, or in the practice of disobedience to their requirements, yet, as a matter of fact, the wrongdoers have inspired the rightdoers with something of their sentiments, and coerced them, as auxiliaries, into their service. A feeling almost universally prevails throughout the Colleges and Schools of our country, that the students, in each Institution, constitute of themselves a kind of corporation; and that this corporation is bound to protect and defend, with the united force of the whole body, any individual member who may be in peril of discipline, although that peril may have been incurred by his own misconduct. If, then, there is a corporation bound together by supposed collective interests, it is certain that this body will have its laws; and, as laws will be inefficacious without penalties, it will have its penalties also. These laws, by those who are proud to uphold and prompt to vindicate them, are called the "Code of Honor, - a name which at once arouses the attention and attracts the sympathies of ardent and ingenuous youth. Being unwritten laws, with undefined penalties, both law and penalty will, at all times, be just what their framers and executors choose to make them. But unwritten laws and undefined penalties are of the very essence of despotism, and hence the sanctions for violating this Code of Honor, so called, are often terrible, so unrelenting and inexorable that few, even of the most talented and virtuous members of our literary institutions, dare to confront and brave them. Often they are the very reverse of the old Roman decree of banishment; for that only deprived a citizen of fire and water, whereas these burn or drown him. They often render it impossible for any supposed offender to remain among the students whose vengeance he has incurred.

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The requisitions of this code are different in different places, and at

different times. Sometimes they are simply negative, demanding that a student shall take care to be absent when anything culpable is to be committed, or silent when called on as a witness for its exposure. Sometimes they go further and demand evasion, misrepresentation, or even falsehood, in order to screen a fellow-student, or a fellow-conspirator, from the consequences of his misconduct. And sometimes, any one who exposes, not merely a violator of college regulations, but an offender against the laws of morality and religion, in order that he may be checked in his vicious and criminal career, is stigmatized as an “informer;" is pursued with the shafts of ridicule or the hisses of contempt, or even visited with some form of wild and savage vengeance.

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It is impossible not to see that when such a sentiment becomes the common law" of a literary institution, offenders will be freed from all salutary fear of detection and punishment. Where witnesses will not testify, or will testify falsely, of course the culprit escapes. This security from exposure becomes a premium on transgression. Lawlessness runs riot when the preventive police of virtuous sentiment and of allegiance to order is blinded and muzzled. Thus, at the very outset, this Code of Honor inaugurates the reign of dishonor and shame. Judged, then, by its fruits, what condemnation of such a code can be too severe ?

But, in the outset, we desire to allow to this feeling, as we usually find it, all that it can possibly claim under any semblance of justice or generosity. When, as doubtless it sometimes happens, one student reports the omissions or commissions of another to a College Faculty, from motives of private ill-will or malice; or, when one competitor in the race for college honors, convinced that he will be outstripped by his rival, unless he can fasten upon that rival some weight of suspicion or odium, and therefore seeks to disparage his character instead of surpassing his scholarship; or, when any mere tattling is done for any mean or low purpose whatever;-in all such cases, every one must acknowledge that the conduct is reprehensible and the motive dishonoring. No student can gain any advantage with any honorable teacher by such a course. The existence of any such case supplies an occasion for admonition, which no faithful teacher will fail to improve. Here, as in all other cases, we stand upon the axiomatic truth, that the moral quality of an action is determined by the motive that prompts it.

But suppose, on the other hand, that the opportunities of the diligent for study are destroyed by the disorderly, or that public or private property is wantonly sacrificed or destroyed by the maliciously mis

chievous; suppose that indignities and insults are heaped upon officers, upon fellow-students, or upon neighboring citizens; suppose the laws of the land or the higher law of God is broken; in these cases, and in cases kindred to these, may a diligent and exemplary student, after finding that he cannot arrest the delinquent by his own friendly counsel or remonstrance, go to the Faculty, give them information respecting the case and cause the offender to be brought to an account; or, if called before the Faculty as a witness, may he testify fully and frankly to all he knows? Or, in other words, when a young man, sent to college for the highest of all earthly purposes,- that of preparing himself for usefulness and honor,—is wasting time, health and character, in wanton mischief, in dissipation or in profligacy, is it dishonorable in a fellow-student to give information to the proper authorities, and thus set a new instrumentality in motion, with a fair chance of redeeming the offender from ruin? This is the question. Let us examine it.

As set forth in the Resolutions, a college is a community. Like other communities, it has its objects, which are among the noblest; it has its laws indispensable for accomplishing those objects, and these laws, as usually framed, are salutary and impartial. The laws are for the benefit of the community to be governed by them; and without the laws and without a general observance of them, this community, like any other, would accomplish its ends imperfectly,- perhaps come to ruin.

Now, in any civil community, what class of persons is it which arrays itself in opposition to wise and salutary laws? Of course, it never is the honest, the virtuous, the exemplary. They regard good laws as friends and protectors. But horse-thieves, counterfeiters, defrauders of the custom-house or post-office, these, in their several departments, league together, and form conspiracies to commit crimes beforehand, and to protect each other from punishment afterwards. But honest farmers, faithful mechanics, upright merchants, the high-toned professional man, these have no occasion for plots and perjuries; for they have no offenses to hide and no punishments to fear. The first aspect of the case, then, shows the paternity of this false idea of "Honor" among students. It was borrowed from rogues and knaves and peculators and scoundrels generally, and not from men of honor, rectitude and purity. As it regards students, does not the analogy hold true to the letter?

When incendiaries, or burglars, or the meaner gangs of pickpockets are abroad, is not he, by whose vigilance and skill the perpetrators can

be arrested and their depredations stopped, considered a public benefactor? And if we had been the victim of arson, housebreaking, or pocket-picking, what should we think of a witness who, on being summoned into court, should refuse to give the testimony that would convict the offender? Could we think anything better of such a dumb witness than that he was an accomplice and sympathized with the villany? To meet such cases, all our courts are invested with power to deal with such contumacious witnesses in a summary manner. Refusing to testify, they are adjudged guilty of one of the grossest offenses a man can commit, and they are forthwith imprisoned, even without trial by jury. And no community could subsist for a month if everybody, at his own pleasure, could refuse to give evidence in court. It is equally certain that no college could subsist, as a place for the growth of morality, and not for its extirpation, if its students should act, or were allowed to act, on the principle of giving or withholding testimony at their own option. The same principle, therefore, which justifies courts in cutting off recusant witnesses from society, would seem to justify a College Faculty in cutting off recusant students from a college.

Courts, also, are armed with power to punish perjury, and the law justly regards this offense as one of the greatest that can be committed. Following close after the offense of perjury in the courts, is the offense of prevarication or falsehood in shielding a fellow-student or accomplice from the consequences of his misconduct. For, as the moral growth keeps pace with the natural, there is infinite danger that the youth who tells falsehoods will grow into the man who commits perjuries.

So a student who means to conceal the offense of a fellow-student, or to divert investigation from the right track, though he may not tell an absolute lie, yet is in a lying state of mind, than which many a sudden, unpremeditated lie, struck out by the force of a vebement temptation, is far less injurious to character. A lying state of mind in youth has its natural culmination in the falsehoods and perjuries of manhood.

When students enter college, they not only continue their civil relations, as men, to the officers of the college, but they come under new and special obligations to them. Teachers assume much of the parental relation towards students, and students much of the filial relation towards teachers. A student, then, is bound to assist and defend a teacher as a parent, and a teacher is bound to assist and defend a stu

dent as a child. The true relation between a College Faculty and College Students is that which existed between Nelson and his sailors: he did his uttermost for them and they did their uttermost for him.

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