part to find out what
he is made of, beats my time! That's a college professor for you, right
through. He thinks of a college student only as something to
teach--whereas, of all the nineteen hundred and eighty-seven things a
college student is, that is about the least important to his notion. A
boy might be a cipher message on an early Assyrian brick and stand a far
better chance of being understood by his professor.

A college Faculty is a collection of brains tied together by a firm
resolve--said resolve being to find out what miscreant put plaster of
Paris in the keyhole of the president's door. It is a wet blanket on a
joyous life; it is a sort of penance provided by Providence to make a
college boy forget that he's glad he's alive. It's a hypodermic syringe
through which the student is supposed to get wisdom. It takes the place
of conscience after you've been destroying college property. When I sum
it all up it seems to me that a college Faculty is a dark, rainy cloud
in the middle of a beautiful May morning--at least that's the way the
Faculty looked to me when I was a humble seeker after the truth in
Siwash College.

The Faculty was to boys in Siwash what indigestion is to a jolly good
fellow in the restaurant district. It was always either among us or
getting ready to land on us. Our Faculty had thirty-two profs and
thirty-three pairs of spectacles. It also had two good average heads of
hair and considerable whiskers. It could figure out a perihelion or a
Latin bill-of-fare in a minute, but you ought to hear it stutter when it
tried to map out the daily relaxations of a college full of husky young
hurricanes, who had come to school to learn what life looks like from
the inside. Fairy tales in the German and tea and wafers with quotations
looked like a jolly good time to the Faculty; and it couldn't understand
why some of us liked to put gunpowder in the tea.

Now don't understand me to say that there isn't anything good about a
college professor. Bless you, no! There's a lot of it. A Faculty is a
lot of college profs in a state of inflammation, but individually most
of the Siwash profs were nearly human at times. I look back at some of
them now with awe. They really knew a lot. They knew so much that most
of them are there yet; and I go back and look at them with a good deal
more respect than I used to have. I'll tell you it fills a chap with awe
to see a man teaching along for twenty years at eighteen hundred