Word: podunk
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Undergraduates at Cornell pack Bailey Hall for concerts, they provide a moderately large audience at the Dramatic Club, they occasionally attend lectures by visiting speakers. But the vast majority are more consistent in their devotion to the moving pictures, a technical discussion of the tactics employed in the Oshkosh-Podunk football game absorbs them more than a good book, and the bridge table is more popular than the lecture hall...
...first year. He is by himself in a world apart, subject to judgment at all times. And this is wise. Conceive Mr. Dumbjohn the name is itself traditional who receives an appointment to the Academy Promptly Father and Mother Dumbjohn print accounts of young hopeful's appointment in the Podunk paper. He is given farewell parties, he lords it over the soft-eyed damsels, he is escorted to the train with the Podunk Fireman's band. The hero is doing the Government a favor to become a cadet...
...attention for all officers. Upper classmen are all Mr. So-and-so to him. He cannot speak to them without being spoken to, he pulls his chin back and elevates his chest by orders, and gradually it dawns on him that he is not appreciated. That the hero of Podunk is completely obscured at West Point! And in him, perhaps, is born the realization that he is important only as one of the Corps; that he must be a part of the team or not play at all that he must learn subordination of self to command...
...siege of the McAlpin by Columbia sophomores, the annual mud-rush at Podunk, and the arrest of a college student for parking too near a fire plug stimulate more frenzied press comment and red-typed leads than the forming of the League of Nations Collegiate Council, the publication of the "Gadfly" and an address by President Eliot together. Naturally, the papers print what their readers want, and the public's interest in college activities is still confined to the lurid incidents which popularly constitute "college life...
...with just as much disfavor as do students of the University of Virginia, for instance. There is no difference in the type of student, at the two universities certainly. Our American democratic spirit grants the First Families of Virginia no higher code of honor than the Last Families of Podunk. We are merely conscious of a different viewpoint...