The student is also too prone to distinguish between academic morals and human morals. As a student, he may crib in examination without compunction. As a student, he too often feels it is right to deceive his teacher. Students who are gentlemen and who would as soon cut their own throats as steal your purse, will yet steal your office sign or the pole of your barber. In such college outlawry he loses no sense of self-respect, and in no degree the respect of his fellow students. Let us confess at once that in what may be called academic immorals there is usually no sense of malice. This condition does create a distinct difference between academic and human ethics. Let the distinction be given full credit. Yet, be it at once and firmly said, a lie is a lie, and thieving is thieving. The blameworthiness may differ in different cases, but there is always blameworthiness.
Be it also said the public does not usually recognize the distinction which the student himself seeks to make. The public becomes justly impatient with, and more or less indignant over, the horseplay, or immoralities which students work outside, and sometimes inside, college walls. The student is to remember that before he was a student he was a man, that after he has ceased to be a student he is to be a man, and while he is a student he is also to be a man, and also before, after, and always he is to be a gentleman. Such irregular conditions belong, of course, to youth as well as to the student. The irreverence which characterizes all American life is prone to become insolence, when, in the student, it is raised to the second or third power. The able man and true—student or not a student—of course presently adjusts himself to orderly conditions. The academic experience proves to be a discipline, though sometimes not a happy one, and the discipline helps towards the achievement of a large and rich character.