The annual dinners of Dartmouth
alumni associations held this winter have, in almost every instance, been unusually well attended. Despite the toll imposed by war service upon graduates young and old, those who had remained at home and those who could by any possibility get home turned out to do' honor to the College and to its visiting representative. In St. Louis every alumnus in the city was on hand to greet President Hopkins. Denver, Omaha, Minneapolis, Chicago report the largest meetings in their history. This remarkable showing is to be attributed to several causes. Dartmouth's splendid record of war service and the straits into which it was plunged, in part as a result of this, have intensified the pride of the alumni in their College and have confirmed their affectionate and generous loyalty toward it. Then, too, the more thoughtful among them are recognizing with increasing certainty the indispensability of sound education as an element in the solution of national problems : and they are looking for leadership not to technical institutes and professional schools but to the old cultural foundations. In President Hopkins they have come to recognize native qualities of broad and fearless vision fortified by an unusually rich and varied, experience!. In a period of hesitation and doubt he speaks as one having authority, and his words find eager hearers.
The last of the winter series of great alumni dinners will be held in Symphony Hall, Boston, on the night of March 5. The cumulative enthusiasm of all the preceding occasions has been piling up for eight weeks to be added to this. It will find further augmentation in Dartmouth's triumphant approach to a onehundred-and-fiftieth birthday. To make this year's Boston celebration an assured and brilliant success President Edwin A. Bayley of the association has been steadily working for months past. The result promises to be- memorable in the annals of Dartmouth College and of the City of Boston. Since it will be at least fifty years to another such party, every one is advised to attend.
THE ALUMNI MAGAZINE restores a student editor in Richard Metcalf Pearson of the Class of 1920. It will be his duty to reflect the student life of the College for the benefit of alumni readers. Mr. Pearson is a student of the first rank, an active partner in most undergraduate affairs, president of the College Press Club. Furthermore, he has Dartmouth parentage and has been brought up in the traditions of the College.
It is being discovered that patience is the first essential of reconstruction. It is well to be sure of proper bearings before charting a new course, and these are best found through taking counsel together. At any rate that appears to be the faculty attitude. The group has had some interesting and fruitful meetings of late in the College Commons where, with innocuous refreshment within arm's reach and in an atmosphere mellowed and deformalized with tobacco, a good many important educational questions have been broached and helpfully discussed. And lest the argument tend toward abstraction, the application to Dartmouth's policy and need, present and future, is kept clearly to the fore.
There is. nothing much more helpful in the life of the College today than these meetings, indicative as they are of openminded readiness to question the validity of the things that are, and of equally conservative willingness to submit the questioning to full and careful examination preliminary to any action. To keep the meetings within bounds a program is prepared in advance and the topics for consideration are announced: oratory is limited by a time fuse. Following is a list of subjects which it is proposed to attack at successive meetings during the year:
1. Does the greatest net advantage lie in the semester system or in the term system? Specifically, which is the more desirable for Dartmouth during the next academic year?
2. If the term system is more desirable, shall the continuous session plan be put into effect?
3. Should the academic schedule be restricted to three courses instead of five?
4. Are any changes in our present requirements for admission desirable? If so, what ?
5. Is it possible to improve our present methods of testing a candidate's fitness for admission?
6. Is scholarship more conserved by the quantitative requirements of the present typical American college curriculum, or would there be advantage in replacing these requirements in part or in whole by qualitative requirements?
7. Should the cut system be abolished and only necessary absences excused? Or should attendance at all college exercises be optional ?
8. What are the functions of a department, and what is the jurisdiction of a department head, (a) in relation to the other members of the department, (b) in relation to the Faculty, (c) in relation to the Trustees? How should department heads be chosen, and for how long a time ?
9. Would there be advantage or disadvantage in the establishment of a series of Visiting Committees for inspection and report upon the work of the different departments and the different instructors within these departments ? Specifically, should there be some "auditing" committee, like the committees representative of the Overseers of Harvard, which should report upon the content of the subjects taught, the range of work covered by the departments, the desirability of the methods used, and the qualifications of the different individuals?
Some friends of Dartmouth have been more or less disturbed by reports of criticism leveled at the College by the Boston superintendent of schools. The gist of this criticism seems to be that Dartmouth, in common with certain other New England institutions, maintains entrance standards calculated to debar from admission the average high school graduate. The presidents of the colleges concerned have made reply: that of President Hopkins has been widely quoted. But just what Superintendent Thompson was getting at still remains rather obscure.
It is, of course, customary for public educators to express the generalization that every child is entitled to the benefits of a college education. As a matter of fact, nothing is further from the truth. Granting, for a short cut, the premise that every child is entitled to such education as he is mentally qualified to derive benefit from, it should be evident that the number of those who can advantageously ascend to successively higher grades will be a steadily diminishing one. And as these higher grades are approached, the more essential to the individual and the common good is the application of an increasingly rigorous process of selection among candidates for admission to them. Higher education is immensely expensive: society has no business to waste it upon those whose cultivability has reached the point of diminishing returns.
And for those who may qualify for higher education there are colleges and colleges. Institutions, particularly those privately endowed, instead of trying to spread themselves over the entire range of curricular possibilities are tending to functionalize; that is, they are beginning to determine individually their proper relation to the needs of society. In so doing they are making deliberate and careful choice of means to their purposely restricted ends. The more this tendency develops, the more evidently outworn will appear the present system of standard entrance requirements. It must in time give way to other methods of determining objectively first, whether the boy is fit for college, and second, what college or what group of colleges is fit for the boy.
Columbia University has already sensed this and is now proposing to apply psychological tests to candidates for admission. By this means it is hoped to pierce the camouflage of mental furbishments applied by the zealous hand of the tutor and to discover actual calibre. The result will be awaited with profound interest. But whatever the outcome, the experiment is interesting as illustrating the conscious effort by at least one institution to find more accurate methods for selecting suitable student material. That this is a quite different thing from the process usually phrased as "raising the entrance requirements" should be. self evident.
Since there was not enough snow for both sleighing and skiing, all the sleighing in the neighborhood was dug up and carted to the jump. Of course this put an end to romantic means of winter locomotion, but it made possible the annual Carnival contests. No records were broken, and, what is more remarkable under the circumstances, no bones. Winter Carnival, however, was predestined, winter or no winter. Those who participated in it will probably rate it the best ever. Certainly it was a great thing for the fraternity houses. War-time abolition of junior prom and last year's sudden decision against Carnival having destroyed the annual incentive to housecleaning, these student shrines had fallen upon rather evil days. Most of them were dirty and determined to remain so. But now they are as immaculate as a student body trained to the meticulous purity of the S. A. T. C. could make them; or they were before the girls came and messed them up again.
And there were numerous girls. For three days the streets of Hanover, usually devoid of youthful femininity, have been populous with girls, pretty, furcoated, wearing arctics flapping studentwise, demurely navigating, in each case with a student clinging with firm anxiety to an arm,—it may be to assure himself that even if this be a dream the vision shall not easily escape him; of, perhaps, in fear lest from the prowling ranks of upperclassmen some jealous one descend to rob him of his prize.
This, of course, was at meal times, or on the way to dances, which appeared to be going on without interruption; arranged thus, no doubt, to convince the weather man of the relative insignificance of his part in the affair. Some of the serious-minded college girls, however, insisted upon attending recitations so as not to get too far behind in their own work ; and a number of surprised instructors thereby had opportunity to obtain sudden first hand experience with the problems of co-education. It is reported that the technique of various individuals in dealing with the emergency showed marked variations from any single standard. It is also reported that The Dartmouth is contemplating a strong editorial urging the establishment of reciprocal credits between Dartmouth and certain colleges for women, so as to enable the lengthening of the Carnival period by several days, while at the same time improving the intellectual tone of the College by making the class room attractive.
Of course, too, there was some indulgence in outdoor sports other than the contests; but they had to be crowded into the hours not occupied with studious activities, or dances, or shows. These, for the most part, were the brief moonlit moments. between 3 and 7 a. m., after which it was time to go to breakfast and chapel and begin the round all over again. Some of the fraternities had rented additional cots from the College to insure adequate sleeping accommodations for their guests. But the introduction of the continuous session program of the Carnival, from daylight to daylight, has proved the expenditure for beds and bedding an unnecessary waste. Henceforth it will be abandoned, and the money thus saved will be utilized in adding extra jazzes to the band. Thus does, modern efficiency, assert itself even in the midst of joy!
There may, perhaps, have been some persons with pre-war minds who looked a little dubiously upon some aspects of Carnival. There were instants when they may have wondered whether the great conflict has brought to young America other teaching than that of the "chimmieshiver." But no doubt it has. After long repression, the first rebound is likely to be high. Presently we shall settle down again, young and old together, to serious purpose. But the serious purpose of the young will never be quite that of their ageing instructors. For to the eyes of twenty even a war-torn world is a wonderful world and a fractured universe an infinity of hope. If forty-odd will seek explanation it must be in parody: "beauty is youth; youth beauty:" and be satisfied with that.
