Brief as was my visit to the University of Kansas, I felt that there, indeed, was "gumption." And it is easy to account for. The breed of men and women who are being raised in the Western States is a sturdier breed than is being produced in the East. They have just as much fun in their college life as any other students do, but practically none of them go to college just "to have a good time," or with the even less creditable purpose of improving their social position. Kansas is still too near to first principles to be concerned with superficialities. It goes to college to work and learn, and its reason for wishing to learn are, for the most part, practical. One does not feel, in the University of Kansas, the aspiration for a vague culture for the sake of culture only. It is, above all, a practical university, and its graduates are notably free from the cultural affectations which mark graduates of some eastern colleges, enveloping them in a fog of pedantry which they mistake for an aura of erudition, and from which many of them never emerge.
Directness, sincerity, strength, thoughtfulness, and practicality are Kansas qualities. Even the very young men and women of Kansas are not far removed from pioneer forefathers, and it must be remembered that the Kansas pioneer differed from some others in that he possessed a strain of that Puritan love of freedom which not only brought his forefathers to Plymouth, but brought him overland to Kansas, as has been said, to cast his vote for abolition. Naturally, then, the zeal which fired him and his ancestors is reflected in his children and his grandchildren. And that, I think, is one reason why Kansas has developed "cranks."
Contrasting curiously with Kansas practicality, however, there must be among the people of that State another quality of a very different kind, which I might have overlooked had I not chanced to see a copy of the "Graduate Magazine," and had I not happened to read the list of names of graduates who returned to the university for the last commencement. The list was not a very long one, yet from it I culled the following collection of given names for women: Ava, Alverna, Angie, Ora, Amida, Lalia, Nadine, Edetha, Violetta, Flo, Claudia, Evadne, Nelle, Ola, Lanora, Amarette, Bernese, Minta, Juanita, Babetta, Lenore, Letha, Leta, Neva, Tekla, Delpha, Oreta, Opal, Flaude, Iva, Lola, Leora, and Zippa.