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A GREATER GETTYSBURG whose petitions for reinstatement were denied. The professors took time out for a petition of their own, asking the trustees in June 1918 to discontinue student government, "as neither the student body nor the Student Council seem to realize the purpose of student participation in college government." Everyone must have breathed a sigh of relief when the term ended and the students went either home or into the service. The trustees expressed the hope that student government could continue, but referred the decision to a joint committee which, when it met, decided that it should go on, at least for the next year. When College opened in September 1918, most male students were under the command of army officers, who were most effective in preventing hazing.372 At the beginning of the first postwar academic year yet another attempt was made to deal with this annoying issue. In September 1919 some 150 upperclassmen presented the faculty with a petition which was also unanimously endorsed at a meeting of the freshman class. The time having come, the petitioners stated, for a closer relationship between students and faculty, they were pledging their "support and influence to eliminate hazing in any form whatever, a practice which has resulted only in harm to the institution." In return, they hoped that the faculty would consider readmitting those suspended students who had by now been "sufficiently punished" for what they had done. The faculty lost no time in accepting the petition and beginning the reinstatements. If the Gettysburgian for October 8, 1919 accurately reflected student sentiment, things had indeed changed since the hectic days of the previous year. Crediting returning servicemen for their help in promoting a different attitude, the editor wrote that Gettysburg students had "been bound by the shackles of an institution which the greater majority of colleges and universities have abolished five to ten years ago. Hazing has had its day and can now be only cast aside as useless since we have come to a better understanding of student relationship." Nevertheless, in spite of petitions and near-unanimous resolutions, hazing persisted. Both Student Council and faculty continued to deal with it as best they could. At long last, its reduced level permitted the introduction of a tolerable method of enforcing freshman customs, the sentiment for which among most students 372The 1919 College catalogue added to the earlier sentence on hazing one which defined the practice in words very similar to the faculty's dictionary definition. In the spring of 1919, upon the recommendation of the Student Council, the president hired a local police officer as a night watchman, with instructions to patrol the dormitories at regular intervals between midnight and daylight. For a somewhat different treatment of the events of 1917-1918, see p. 472. For an account of hazing at Dickinson, which also had its sophomore band, see Sellers, Dickinson College, p. 298. 67