ABSTRACT
Woodrow Wilson’s famous lament that extracurricular “sideshows” were perverting college life reflected the potency of the new student subculture. Complaints like Wilson’s masked the extent to which adults and youths shared values and college authorities succeeded in co-opting the student culture. Important as football and other sports were to the student culture, athletics was just the most prominent part of the newspapers’ broader emphasis on activities. A faculty-dominated journal in the 1880s and a more typical student publication in the 1890s, it became a serious student literary magazine in the 1900s. College authorities, recognizing students’ growing self-sufficiency and organizational proficiency, began to enlist their assistance in regulating college life. Between 1870 and 1917, college authorities had gone from concern about the spreading contagion of vice, to naive faith in student organizations as reform agents, to a revised in loco parentis based on administrative control of student organizations and residential life.
