Word: freshman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Bradley admits readily that he is far from happy with the present tutorial and advisory system at Penn. "We don't have a tutorial system--it is not consisten with our tradition," he says. But, he adds, "I wish our counselling methods had worked out better. Each incoming freshman gets an academic adviser, who usually becomes his sophomore supervisor as well. The function of the adviser during the first two years is at best loosely defined, and many underclassmen rarely see the men assigned to them. When students begin to concentrate in the junior year, they receive a "major adviser...
...page seven of the University of Pennsylvania's freshman handbook, a high-minded quote from Ben Franklin, the founder of the University, appears: "The instruction of youth is one of those employments which to the public are most useful; it ought therefore to be esteemed among the most honorable. Its successful exercise does not, however, always meet with the reward it merits, except in the satisfaction of having contributed to the forming of virtuous and able men for the service of their country...
Noble sentiments, these. Thus it seems incongruous, to say the least, when one finds three pages later the following "Freshman Regulations...
...Dinks" are ludicrous beanies that rarely fit and are greatly unbecoming to the freshman. Regulation number four tries to justify the wearing of the caps: "The purpose...is to instill the true spirit of Pennsylvania into the Class...
...Dinks" are one symptom of an acute childishness that affects the student body. These inane freshman beanies do not speak well for a University with a public credo of individualism and dignity. Hypocrisy shows forth in different attitudes toward this custom. Dean Peters describes the requirement--all freshmen must wear dinks--as a sort of harmless, inoffensive jest which is not strictly enforced. Yet freshmen will attest to the violence of the rule's administrators, and only brave or foolish men will defy the kangaroo court which orders them to display their dinks and buttons...