OUTRAGED by the disgraceful conduct of his students, a great educator fled his campus in disgust, says the lead paragraph of this week's Essay. The educator was St. Augustine, the year was A.D. 383, the place the campus of Carthage, and the one who called the fact to Essay Writer Marshall Loeb's attention is a 20th century student.

The historical note was unearthed by Henry Muller of Stanford University, one of our many campus stringers--young men and women with whom TIME has a working alliance for news related to colleges. As higher education has become a greater source of news both in the U.S. and abroad, we have placed increasing emphasis on the efforts of student reporters who tell us about campus attitudes and matters of educational interest with a sensitivity and immediacy which an outsider could attain only with great difficulty, if at all.

Many of the stringers are editors of student newspapers or are in other ways deeply involved in campus activities. Nearly all of them find that reporting for TIME makes them give more thorough consideration to what is going on, not only on their campuses but also far beyond, bringing local insights into broad perspective. Their TIME credentials usually will help get them in to see the president of the university or into a student protest conference, but the job often does call for some special approaches--particularly with people who happen to disagree with us. Says Gloria Anderson, our girl at the University of Wisconsin: "Being a stringer for TIME demands that you know some psychology as well as journalism. While saying, 'I'm the campus correspondent for TIME Magazine' is enough to open many doors, it almost always invites the news source to deliver himself of his long-premeditated philosophy of TIME. TIME is a phenomenon like the weather--everybody feels qualified to comment about it."

While the campus stringers report more for Education than any other section of the magazine, they often contribute to such areas as The Nation, Essay, Modern Living and Sport. Their jobs involve hours of extra work. Don Morrison, our stringer at the University of Pennsylvania, is an extremely busy campus editor and honors student who admits that he is sometimes exasperated when students, faculty and administrators--not to mention TIME staffers--pester him at odd hours with queries, requests, suggestions and sometimes complaints about what TIME has said. How ever, his occasional chagrin disappears when a campus source, trying to put over an idea to TIME, will tell him, as one did recently: "See what you can do, Don. They listen to you there."

The student reporters, some of whom apply for the job while others come to our attention through campus activities, often go on to careers in journalism. Some of our regular staff began as TIME campus stringers. James Willwerth, a reporter for The Nation section who is now on military leave, first reported for us from the Berkeley campus of the University of California. World Writer Jason McManus and Saigon Correspondent David Greenway both began at Oxford in England.

All our campus stringers agree that the job brings diversity. Seth Lipsky of Harvard last fall found himself drinking champagne from chemistry beakers with Biology Professor George Wald, who had just won a Nobel prize; not long after, he was on the phone with Radcliffe's President Mary Bunting, asking her views on miniskirts for our Rudi Gernreich cover (Dec. 1). "That may have been my most nervous phone call," he says, "but also, appropriately, my shortest."

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