Collegiate

Newspaper cartoonists for a decade have clothed the college undergraduate in raccoon-skin coat, baggy trousers, battered and blighted felt hat. Such were the sacerdotal vestments of the initiate "collegian." But last week, Princeton's witty and learned Dean Christian Gauss hailed the passing of the coonskin. Said he: "Undergraduates who wear coonskin coats now are not nearly so jaunty about it as they used to be; they are quite properly a little shamefaced. Their Eskimoish enduements are relics of the past age of 'collegiatism.' Students now wear them for lack of polo coats or Chesterfields."*

Since "collegiate" and its derivatives seemed to need a definition, Dean Gauss ventured: "To me it [collegiate] means nonsense, fiddle-faddle, bumptious social immaturity complicated sometimes but not always by acute class consciousness."

* Velvet-collared black or dark blue coats.