Don't waste your years at USC
University of Southern California
DAILY • TROJAN
VOL. XYIII	LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, TUESDAY, SEDTEMBER 13, 1966	N0 1
It is extremely disturbing to reflect on my past three years at LTSC and to have doubts in my mind as to how well I have Liken advantage of them.
I had spent 18 years in pre-college preparation and have watched my parents spend a fantastic amount of their life earnings as well as their lives in getting me to this point. I cannot help but feel very guilty for even having to question the value derived from the last three years of my life.
I hope that I am a unique case in this respect and that no one else has asked himself the same questions.
I came to USC with many goals for myself—all of them lofty ones. I have attained few, and in the process have watched many slip by without having put up a good fight. University is the place for lofty goals, but even more it is a place for lofty efforts.
Looking back I could rationalize many of my failures on the university system or more particularly, USC itself. But deep down, is that sickly feeling that I have no one to blame but myself—and that hurts the most.
Many of you have come to college to escape the hardness that is life and the countless disappointments that living it can bring.
College can be such an escape. For one, it can be the regressive fancy of party and pantry raid, an ideal retreat from growing up and a backstop for responsibility.
But what college really is is an attitude, a way of life. It is reading words put intobook form by millions of writers for the purpose of catching a glimpse of what tiKe world we live in is really like, or seeing if it is possible to see something so complex at all. It is refusing to take the minutest aspects of living for granted, and realizing that the textbook is not the final word to be written on any subject, but merely a springboard for the thinkers of the future.
For the most part, college is discovering that most of what pertains to Man is unknown, and most of the questions meaningful to him are unanswered.
After orientation is over, many of you
volve the responsibility of loyalty and service. Honor societies demand responsibility for promoting scholarship. Service organizations assume responsibility for initiation and continuation of various student projects. Student government means responsibility to pass legislation for the benefit of the university. The classrooms, lectures and professors face you with the responsibility of preparing yourself for your future.
A previous Daily Trojan editor, writing on this same subject once said that, “College is the fertile womb of all science, all research, all philosophy.
“This active, intense, concentrated endeavor is the proper realm of the student. It is an exciting realm, filled with the excitement of the big sports weekend, of social events, of meeting new faces and new situations.
“Most of all. it is the excitement of day-to-day contact with the ideas and theories of the ages, with disciplines enveloping the full range of human experience, with what Matthew Arnold called ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world.' ”
The university is man, his life and his environment. Man is an ever-searching, ever-expanding creature and thus the university is the ideal habitat for nature’s most unique creation.
Life on the outside of the university, outside of this fertile, protected complex, is harsh, narrow and constricting.
College is much more than football games, fraternities and sororities, student government, textbooks, professors, classrooms, friends and interests. It is something much bigger.
College is the responsibility to fulfill that innate urge in all of us to push the frontiers of human goals and accomplishments one mite further into the unknown.
Do this one thing, if nothing else, or walk out of USC in your cap and gown with your diploma in your hand and ask yourself —Did I take full advantage of my four years here ?
ily and to a large number it is merely the necessary preparation for the best years which are to follow.
It doesn't matter whether you regard your college years or later years as the best. It does matter that when you complete your curriculum here, most of you will know that your college life was a rewarding one or a dismal failure due to your inability to face responsibility.
There are many ways to face responsibility at a university. Social fraternities in-
Discovery
University can and should be much more than pep rallies, football games and classroom lectures. It is discovering that most of what pertains to Man is unknown, and most of the guestions meaningful to him are unanswered. Will you waste your four years at the university?
By STEVE HARRIS Editor
will be surprised to find that college life is more than a high-pitched football thriller followed by a continual round of fraternity parties.
Many will call your four years at college the best years of your life, but for those overloaded with responsibilities, college years will be anything but the best. To them, college is a grind squeezed between 40 hours or more a week of outside employment.
For many going to college it is an added burden to the problem of supporting a fam-