In itself this is good evidence of the University's success as a center of education; but these increasing throngs of students bring many difficult problems, not the least of which is the necessity of finding an adequate supply of teachers, class rooms, and laboratories. Equally, life in the University becomes more complicated. The ideal simplicity of academic life, the intimate contact between fellow-students and between students and Faculties, is all too easily lost in the leveling tendencies which numbers make inevitable. This is the great danger of the large University--but a peril that has been recognized and has been met with at least some degree of success.
The student organizations, fraternities, and clubs, which have multiplied to so remarkable a degree, are perhaps the first and most important student reaction. Many if not most of these organizations have some connection with individual Faculty members, either through alumni on the Faculty or through honorary members, and this forms a basis at least for some extra class-room relationship. Sometimes, on occasion, a certain restraint on the part of the Faculty becomes inevitable, and the establishment of a Committee on Student Affairs, originally a committee on "non-athletic" relations, created some fifteen years ago, has resulted. This committee has accomplished much towards directing student activities into proper and worthwhile channels, though the ghost of the classic charge of unwelcome paternalism arises occasionally. The only answer necessary is the evident improvement in the general standards of all student organizations and the mere fact that they have, for the most part, continued to exist through several student generations; no little accomplishment in itself, when one remembers the almost automatic rise and fall of these societies in the early days.
If the University and particularly the Faculty has been concerned with these problems, incident upon the University's growth, so have the students themselves. They have seen the necessity for constructive effort and have established such agencies as the Student Council and the Inter-fraternity Council among the men, and the corresponding Judiciary Council and Pan-Hellenic Association among the women. Above all, the University has profited by the two great organizations which have been the most effective expression of student life and ideals,--the Michigan Union and the Women's League.