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 dollars per, and raising children, and buying books, and going off to Europe now and then on that princely sum--and coming through it all happy and content with life. I go around them nowadays with my hat off and try to persuade them that if it wasn't for my sprained arm I could quote Latin almost as well as the stone dog in front of Prexy's house.
And some of them are bully good fellows, too. Nowadays they take me into their studies at Commencement and give me good cigars, making sure first that there are no undergraduates around. Why, one of the profs I worried the most, when I was a cross between a Sophomore and a spotted hyena, is as glad to see me nowadays as though I owed him money. He runs a little automobile, and I hope I may get laid out in the subway if I haven't heard him cuss in real United States when the clutch slipped. And he was the chap who used to pick out the passages in Livy that had inflammatory rheumatism and make me recite on them, and who always told me that a student who smoked cigarettes would be making a wise business move if he brought his hat to recitation and left the less important part of his head at home.
But, as I was saying, the Faculty at Siwash, like all other Faculties, didn't know its place. It wasn't satisfied with teaching us Greek and Latin and Evidences of Christianity and tall-brow twaddle of all sorts. It had to butt into our athletics and regulate them. Did you ever see a farmer regulate a weed patch with a hoe? You know how unhealthy it is for the weeds. Well, that was the way the Faculty regulated our athletics. It didn't believe in athletics anyway. They were too interesting. They might not have been sinful, but they were not literary and they were uneconomic. Of course all the professors admitted that good outdoor exercise was healthy for college boys, but most of them believed that you ought to get it in the college library out of Nature books. And so the way they went at the real athletics, to keep them pure and healthful, almost drove us into the violent ward.