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A SALUTARY INFLUENCE tinued until 1920, when the staff decided that selections were being made too often on the basis of popularity rather than merit. A new constitution vested the power to choose the staff in a board of four students and three faculty.329 The liberal position which the faculty took in 1909 and the withdrawal of the direct hand of the board from the affairs of student publications some years later did not mean that the censor had disappeared from the scene. After all, the faculty had said there were existing ways of dealing with what might be considered abuses of free speech. In 1915 they began using these ways when they summoned the editor of the 1916 Spectrum to explain why he had not submitted his copy for review before publication. Apparently, the professors were annoyed by what a later generation might regard as good-natured kidding of the faculty, well within the bounds of propriety. They were so incensed by what they termed the editor's "wilful and repeated deception" that they placed him on probation for the rest of his undergraduate career and decreed that he could not represent the College in any way. A year later the faculty suspended the editor of the Gettysburgian for a similar offense, but they soon restored him after being assured that procedures satisfactory to them would be followed in the future. In the middle 1920s the U.L.C.A. survey team concluded that "no student activity in the Lutheran colleges is so directly the mouthpiece of the student body as the student publications," including the newspaper. "Whatever the nature of the publication it is generally representative of the thinking and activities of the undergraduates." This is an accurate characterization of the Gettysburgian. The two supervisory committees which the board of trustees had established continued in revised form into the 1940s, but after about 1915 they existed as purely faculty agencies, which reported to no other body. The newspaper and its sister publications had faculty advisers. It was understood that they should review all copy before it went to the printer. The Gettysburgian staff told the U.L.C.A. survey team that their adviser did exactly that, but rarely rejected anything. Once, they said, the staff refused to accept the criticism which he offered.330 Occasionally, the newspaper complained about alumni criticism of what it was publishing. "Gettysburg has made no big place for itself in the sun," wrote the editor on May 4,1927, "but it will never find a bigger place so long as its sons 329In a sense, the constitution of 1920 marked a return to a self-perpetuating staff, but now there was a faculty voice in the selection. In announcing a new constitution in the issue of December 4,1930, the editor stated that previously "the paper had no constitution or by-laws whatsoever" and had to rely "on the unwritten tradition of the past." Obviously he was unaware of constitutions adopted in 1913, 1920, and 1923, as well as of amendments approved on many other occasions. 330U.L.C.A. Survey, 2:383, 391. 64