VARSITY STUDENTS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 192, 7 April 1932, Page 2

VARSITY STUDENTS

AYERAGE INTELLIGENCE LEVEL LOWER THAN IN PAST. BUT AS MANY CLEAR THINKERS. VANCOUVER, Jan. 20. The average of intelligence in the student body of the universities has gone down in recent years, according to Dr. George M. Weir, head of the Department of Education at the University of British Columbia. "But that is because more are there. There are just as many clear and clever thinkers in our universities now as ever before," he said. Morals, said Dr. Weir, are the customs and habits of a people. To-day the world is wanderingt in a bewildering maze of changing conceptions of what is right and wrong. "If a young woman smoked a cigarette* in public 14 years ago she would be considered hard-boiled. To-day, if she does not, I am afraid her friends think her half-baked. And there have been times when men were put to death for smoking or even for drinking coffee. As to who is moral and how his morality is to be known there was a wide variance of thought. "Any business man is expected to advertise, hut it is unethical for a physician or a surgeon to do the same thing — that is, to tell the world what he has to sell. "Is truth something static, solid, infallible and unchangeahle, or does it vary with the times ? A recent college survey showed that few students know the Ten Commandments. i myself have known prominent merchants who did not know all the words in the Golden Rule, but the important thing is that they understood its meaning. Is it theft to sell a man a house for a down payment and credit when you know he cannot pay? Legally it is not, but morally it is," Dr. Weir declared, adding that it was illegal, hut in his opinion not immoral , foh a starving man to steal ,a ioaf of bread. "As a matter of fact stealing seems to depend upon who does it. The big fellows get away with it," he said, with caustic reference to the recent Beauharnois scandal. "Our own young people 1 share in the common knowledge of that graft and scandal, and see in it a way to enrich themselves and get away with it. "One example like that is more dangerous than all the false teachings of Communism, which refute themselves.