The Waterbury Democrat., 1946-08-12
The Firing Line By D. N. T.
OLD COLLEGE DAYS

tastic, looking back on the instruc- ton offered, to try to relate what you learned in college to what you are doing today. In all seriousness, the one piece of information that we most clearly remember as the fruit of professorial patience is that verbs meaning advise, per suade, believe, command, obey, yield, envy, flatter, trust, please and so forth, and their opposites, take dative object.
 In career embracing sundry lines of endeavOr and a rather large number of social contracts, we have never been called upon to edify pleasant company or an inquisitive individual with our knowledge of this alteration from the classic ac- cusative. Many a time we might have demonstrated a flicker of intel igence in conversation had we re- membered the categories of algae, Cyranes Nous sommes les cadets de Gascogne,' whether C2 H2 O5 were the potable or impOtable kind of alcohol, the rule of progression, the diagram of the alimentary tract, what comes after inter vitae scele- risque purus," or who wrote Frank enStein."
 But life is not that way. Too often too many talk too much on too many topics that you know too lit- tie about. While we can remember a cartoon in College Humor that showed one young gentleman of color asking another at the class room door "Is yuh did yuh Greek?", 7, We cannot remember, even faintly, who marched where in the Anabasis and who marched back from where in the Catabasis. Or whether the AnabaSis was the going one and the Catabasis the returning" one. Or whether Catabasis tages an ini- Or whether Catabasis takes an ini-
 We can imagine good old Proxy sitting back and reiterating his the sis that the primary aim of the aca- demic college should not be the in- culcation of precise and unfOrget- table information, but the develop ment of the intellect's receptivity to ideas through the broadening influ- ence of study. We can almost hear him say: You do not need to know anything, if you know WHERE to look it up."
 And just WHERE would you look up a Latin ode, if you couldn't re- member whether it's creator was Juvenal, Ovid, Propertius, or Quin- tus Horatius Flaccus, or anyone of dozen other assorted old Roman Falernian bibbers? WHERE would you look up algae, if you couldn't remember whether they were fauna and Wiggled-or f1ora-and didn't?
 The principal flaw in the but-you- know where to look -it-up theory is that former collegians, being human beings and, hence, lazy, would rather be lazy than infallible, and, so never do look it tip. They insulate themselves in cOncentric circles of not-lOOking -it-up, over the years, and you can tell the year they
 graduated by chopping them down and counting the circles.
 An aversion to practicality marks all the great liberal educators of the i day, who hew to the academic line and the will to open the flood gates of the intellect, whether the pro- cess ever leads to S147 an hour or not. They are right, of course; money isn't everything. The capa city to live on good terms with your self and the rest of the world is more precious than the jewels of the Indes and it pays off in content ment in the end.
 There are far more alumni of the well-wOrn School of Experience than of any other institution, how ever. And we rather like their de- finitiOn of university:
 A university is log with a pro lessor On one side, student on the other, and a smoothly working saw flowing industriously back and forth between them.