The Club took a more hopeful view of the case, and it was voted that our Club should resolve itself into the trustees and faculty of a Post Graduate School for Academic Donors.  Our committee recommended that we qualify our advanced students by conferring the lower degree of Heedless Donor (H.D.) every year upon all givers who can be shown to have given at random.  No method of instruction seemed more appropriate than the seminar plan of practical exercises based on concrete instances.  The first laboratory experiment was performed in the presence of a Seminar of seven H.D.’s. in a specially called meeting of married professors attired only in bath gowns borrowed from the crews and base ball teams.  Into this assembly the class of H.D.’s was suddenly introduced.  They naturally inquired into the meaning of the spectacle, and were informed that in no case did the mere salary of these professors enable them to wear clothes at all.  “But you do usually wear clothes?” inquired a student of a favorite professor.  “How do you get them?” “By University extension lecturing at ten dollars a lecture” was the quiet answer.  Another professor explained that he got his clothes by tutoring dull students, another by book reviewing.  One somewhat shamefacedly said the clothes came from his wife’s money.  One declined to answer, and, as a matter of fact, his clothes are habitually first worn by a more fortunate elder brother.

On the whole the results of our first seminary exercise were satisfactory.  One student immediately drew a considerable check for the salary fund, another, who had been planning to give a hockey rink, said he would think things over.  Still a third deposited forty pairs of slightly worn trousers with the university treasurer, “for whom it might concern.”  Only one accepted the demonstration contentedly.  He admitted that low pay and extra work were hard on the Professors, but he also felt that these outside activities advertised the university and were good business.  Of course you wore out some professors in the process, but you could always get others.

Our second seminary exercise was of a less spectacular sort.  The post graduate donors were each provided with a bibliography.  This in every instance contained the titles of books that a particular professor or graduate student in the university would need to consult for his studies of the ensuing week.  It was briefly explained by Professor Senex that original research could not be successfully accomplished without reference to all the original sources and to the writings of other scholars.  The bibliographies ran from ten titles or so to nearly a hundred, according to the nature of the particular research involved.  The exercise consisted in going to the university library and matching these titles of desiderata with the books actually in the catalogue.  After varying intervals, the post graduate donors returned with their report.  Nobody had found more than half the books sought for:  many had found less.