This condition of ill-training

This condition of ill-training is intensified considerably in an institution like the state university, because of the large number of technical students in attendance, many of whom are more interested in acquiring information than getting a real education, and who look upon time as wasted unless it is put in in the acquiring of cold facts which may later be put to use in the earning of money.

That’s Thomas Arkle Clark, Dean of Men at UIUC, writing in 1921 in his book Discipline and the Derelict. He also writes that 70% of students in his anonymous survey admitted to cheating (“cribbing,” as it was then called.) He is pretty high on the student-athlete, who he says subscribes to ideals that were less-well known in his own time as an Illinois undergrad, back in the ’80s:

The athlete was not always so worthy of emulation as he is at present. I do not have to go back farther than my own college days nor even so far as that to recall instances of men who found their way into colleges for the sole purpose of developing or exhibiting their physical powers, of making an athletic team, and without any intention of adding to their intellectual strength.