P RSP CTIYES University Of Michigan Literary Magazine VOL. 1L, No. 2 DECEMBER, 1938 As e Gaily Martch Along tFirst 100 Years By DAVE SPENGLER r. T IS SATURDAY MORNING and you just got a bolt from your ten o'clock. You should study for your next hour, but your head is a little fuzzy from last night's bit of dissipation, i so you feel the walk you're taking will brace you. You walk with purposefu step across the campus to South State street and into the drug store for your morning coke. You down it slowly, standing at the foutain, pretending in- difference to the campus queen in sadle shoes playing bridge in a booth with three guys who are pretending great interest in their cards. As you shallow the last piece of ice in your glass, you remember that to satisfy your con- science you've either got to walk or study, so you pay for your coke, stick a nickle in the mechanical victrola from force of habit, and leave without waiting to hear the music. As you hit the air the carillon bells chime the half-hour and you think of what an expensive clock the Burton Memorial Tower is. You wonder why Along is was stuck so close to Hill Auditorium, few years whose ponderous bulk hides the base of Jean Pau the tower. Then you remember that the here, was music school is to go on the other side, project ea and the three buildings are to form some wrking e kind of a unit. You marvel at the way working they whip up buildings at Michigan, enrolls. U and notice for the first time, as you who enrol sight down the mall toward the Horace nique. Fr Rackham graduate school, recently fin- not new. ished, how the campus is spreading out. When you think of the kaleidoscope Raphael; that is Michigan-its hospital, football of Arts. T team, golf course, research institutions, to be don powerhouse, railroad crossing at Cath- to eight h erine street-you wonder if you're not that what rather superfluous to the whole set-up. would be You wonder what the University was like before it offered concerts at Hill The Auditorium, plays in the Lydia Mendel- idea, then ssohn theatre, dances at the Union, and Soil Indus teas at the. president's home. You sud- were Henr denly decide that the stadium is infin- itely more important to the University Weddige. than you, and head back to the drug store with the intention of cutting your eleven o'clock. Michigan University is forever meet- Charlie's ing judgement. "The greatest university spends his in the world," enthuses Governor Mur- For Ch phy. "We are making progress, but He is enr there's room for improvement," states ture, Scie the professor. "A hot-bed of radical- not a ver ism!" decries a worrying Hearst paper. are. Nobo "What a rat-race," mutters the bewil- tell him; dered student on probation. "My, what is quite s a beautiful place." says the visitor from political Pontiac. And the visitor is right; the an organi trees are beautiful, many of the build- know how ings are beautiful, the layout of the that the campus shows much of careful planing. for him . It would never have done to build Angell Then, at Hall on the quadrangle walk, with a demic hod tarpaper machine shed tacked to its But Ch side. stretch ab But there is evidence to show that noises thr everything about the University has not shrewdly been planned as carefully at its build- ternity par ings and grounds, nor makes so neat a conscious. pattern-phases of the University which with a so: Governor Murphy overlooks in his en- school dre thusiasm, which our professor neglects, University and our visitor can not hope to see. as confide Weakness in the very soul of the Uni- thesis cov versity which drive Charlie Contempor- search on ary to the tai erns, movies and bowling first year, alleys. Weaknesses which account for his writing with the nation-wide awakening of interest in mural painting in the past , a class was started in frescoes at the University year before last under 1 Slusser. The mural depicting soil industries in Michigan, reproduced the result of last year's class work. The class as a whole works on one ch spring, and although the purpose of the work is to teach the art of n frescoe, each member has to be an artist in his own right before he sually the class is made up of graduate students and independent artists I in the class for the express purpose of learning this specialized tech- escoe is probably the most permanent form of mural painting but it is It was used in the Renaissance by such men as Michaelangelo and Diego Rivera used it in his much discussed work in the Detroit Institute he difficult thing about frescoe work is that all the actual painting has e before the third and last coat of plaster is entirely dry. I takes from six ours for it to dry. It takes from six to eight hours for it to dry, and after ever is done cannot be erased. A mural the size of the one shown here divided up into three or four areas and worked on one area at a time. design is chosen by competition. Each member of the class submits his Professor Slusser chooses the one to be used. The design used here, for stries, was the work of Frank Cassara. The other members of the class ry Bernstein, Donald Gooch, Maurice Merlin, Milo O'Leary, and Emil Morris the mhaterialist, class of 1910, hurrying past Tappan oak on his way to the laboratory, would have been as- tounded at the rapidity of expansion and change in personality of the Uni- versity if anyone had pointed them out to him. And he would immediately have forgotten the whole thing, for he was busy making a place for himself in a. twentieth century that was to demand men who could do things; men who could clear up the static from its radios, cure its colds, or use the weeds in its vacant lots to make rubber. 11 By Clarence the Classicist, we mean and student of the period 1837-52. Louis the Democrat went to school in the per- iod 1852-71. Morris the Materialist, from 1871-1929. All three of these boys had something which Charlie Contemporary lacks: a clearcut idea of what they were doing at the University and where they were headed. Clarence the Classi- cist came to the University in 1848 with the purpose of getting an education, and he felt he was getting it. He had come to-a drowsy little mid-western col- lege which in common with other colleges all over the country, was based on the studies of the Greek and Latin"classics". It taught a curriculum that was a hang- over from Renaissance humanism. For all Clarence knew, education was a matter of digging into the past, and would always remain so. Better minds than his had. decided the subjects which constituted learning. All Clarence had to do was to take the courses mapped out for him by the University for his entire residence, which, as a matter of fact, was every course the University had to offer. Clarence must have been a hardy lad. He took unflinchingly, such gems as Xenophon's Cyropaeda, Horace, Ho- mers Odyssey, Stuart's Intellectual Phil- osophy, and Whately's Logic. He bal- ancedthis with more mathematics than Carter had pills, with Bourdon's Alge- tion, trig, calculus, and more. French and German, but recently added to the curriculum gave the modern touch, made him a well-rounded man. Clarence was probably pround of his library of Greek and Latin literature when he finished school. Lord knows, he had a right to be, if he read it all. Un- less he longed for the secluded life of the University, and returned to teach, he probably never opened them again. For distasteful as the thought might be to the sensitive mind, Clarence had a liv- ing to make, and the process took up much of his time and more of his ener- gies. And the Odyssey didn't help him much with his bookkeeping, although he had had the satisfaction of having been four years a scholar. The University had not taken into account that Clar- ence might welcome some groundwork in a subject which he could use after he was graduated; its mellow curriculum stemmed from no understanding of modern educational needs. Clarence probably could impress a debt of his day no end with table-talk of Homer and Folsom's Livy, but he must have had trouble convincing her father that he was a good man to take into his busi- ness or profession on the srength of what he had learned in college. And if Clarence wasn't interested in the hectic business world, but longed to write, say, the chances are that he would spend disdain of the grind who Friday nights at a study hall. arlie is a bewildered student. olled in the College of Litera- =ces and the Arts, but he has y clear idea of what the arts dy has ever been quite able to perhaps because nobody else ure. Charlie takes economics, science, history, Spanish and. i chemistry course he doesn't he got into. He almost wishes courses he took werelaid out with no selection on his part. least, the blame for his aca- dgc-podge would not be his. arlie doesn't worry too long at a out his confusion, instead he ough countless movies, angles for invitations to all the fra- rties, and becomestoo clothes- Occasionally he remembers rt of vague notalgia his prep ams of his coming life at the . He had pictured himself nt, restrained, forever buying ers to bind his exhaustive re- something or other. But in his he couldn't see the need for g a thesis, and since then he hadn't cared much whether there's a need or not. He only thinks about it now during his times out from the li- brary when he smokes at the side en- trance and then not for sustained per- iods, for everytime he looks at the Tap- pan oak, he wonders idly how you pro- nounce Tappan. Clarence the Classicist also wondered about Tappan as he strolled the yet un- personalized oak on his way to his Greek class, carrying under his arm a copy of Homer's Odyssey, and Paley's Natural Theology. Clarence, of the senior class of 1852, was interested to see what the vigorous Tappan would do. Clarence didn't know it, but he was bringing up the tail end of an age of the University which its newly elected president was soon to finish. It is doubtiul whether Louis the Democrat '71 knew that ne was living in compromise between a period of the classical and practical which Tappan had started and Haven continued. It is doubtful whether Louis thought of it as a period at all. He took his Latin-scien- tific course with the view of filling an important place in an expanding Amer- ica, and let it go at that.