DARTMOUTH’S DAY

The recent celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the College occasioned wide-spread newspaper comment. A few of the more significant editorial expressions are here printed. The first is from the Boston Transcript:

Dartmouth’s great day has come. October 17- 20 harvests the memories of a century and a half of this sturdy American college’s life. And what a harvest! Not so old and not so large as some other American colleges, this venerable New Hampshire maker of men has won a permanent and enviable academic status. She is a hardy perennial in the garden of American learning and civilization, and every true American, Dartmouth man or not, and college man or not, is justly proud of her.

Each college, like each man or race or na- tion, has its own peculiar individuality. And each American college, like each American State, has its own individual, and inalienable mission to fulfill. Being Americans, we are proud and glad to perceive a certain family mission to fulfill. Being Americans, we are our colleges and within the gracious and grow- ing life of all of them collectively. But again, just because we are Americans and believe that due individuality must ever accompany due collective unity in order bring forth due union, we would no more care to see even two or three of our established colleges as like as two peas than we would care to pro- mote such an undue uniformity between two or more of our numerous States. As in the po- litical world of inter-democracy, so in the aca- demic inter-democracy constituted by our glo- rious sisterhood of American colleges and uni- versities ; not undue fusion, but, as Dart- mouth’s own and most famous son declared with regard to our National Union, “liberty and union” is the ideal that spells true col- lective life in the affairs of men.

And due academic liberty means, among other things, the cultivation of a proper and distinctive individual genius on the part of each of our colleges, big and little. Who, were it possible, would like to see Harvard ape Yale or Yale ape Harvard, or Princeton ape either, in their respective internal policies and meth- ods? A certain degree and certain forms of intercollegiate uniformity, a certain rapproche- ment and due co-operation in the establishment of academic standards, is of course advisable. In some particulars it should indeed be imper- ative; for example, in such a matter as the common adoption of our colleges of a decent knowledge of American civics as a require- ment for admission, and a correspondingly common prescription of America’s constitu- tional history as at least one course of study within the curricula that might otherwise re- main largely elective. The political duties and mission of our colleges is a special, a patri- otic and supremely authoritative element in their common life. But in general, and with regard to general academic policies, there is far more danger of too much identity and too little individuality in academic movements than of the opposite. The trend of our day is too much toward undue fusion in every phase of our collective life, and too little toward true and democratic interdependence.

Hence it is that, when looking toward the unknown future, we justly glory in whatever of individuality we may find in our colleges. We welcome it and would promote it, just as we welcome and promote their friendly rival- ries in sport. Academic competition, based on due academic individuality, is not only consis- tent with academic co-operation, but is the life of wholesome academic intercourse and mu- tual advancement. And when we find a col- lege—and does not that mean about every Amer- ican college?—whose very name evokes in our minds the image of a true American, whose type of Americanism is yet distinct from every other such type, and that by its very distinc- tiveness helps to create the variety and rich- ness of common American manhood, where- fore should we not rejoice and feel renewed assurance of our complete democracy’s im- mortality?

And such an institution Dartmouth notably is. From the days of its founder to those of its filial preserver and champion a century ago, and from the day of Webster even unto our own day and generation, she has been one of the noblest and most picturesque plants in our national garden. And the plant has grown into the proportions of a tree. And the tree is an oak tree, like unto no other tree, whether pine, or ash, or birch. And the tree still stands, putting forth branches and renewing its life after its own individual kind each year. And we, the people, continue to cherish that tree, in the same American spirit as we cherish the rest of our national and beneficent trees of academic knowledge. Long life to Dartmouth!