COMMUNICATIONS
275 Prospect Place Brooklyn, N. Y.
To the Editor of ALUMNI MAGAZINE. Dartmouth College, Hanover, N. H., Dear Sir:
May I beg space in your columns to correct an ambiguity in the editorial of your August number which comments upon the report of the Senior Educational Committee? One has no means during these summer months of knowing whether or not there is any considerable alumni interest in the findings of the Committee; but since you have given several columns of editorial space to its work, perhaps the correction should be made regardless—and particularly since it strikes so close to the heart of the Committee's report.
The ambiguity amounts to this: you have confused "the preliminary report" with the final report of the Committee, "the monograph of 40,000 words" to which you refer. Concluding one paragraph in which you make reference to the monograph, you return without . warning to discuss the preliminary report; and the reader gathers the impression that you are discussing and weighing, not the preliminary sketch, but the Committee's final, sandpapered, and polished work. Now it may well be that to the mind of the mature alumnus the report may seem neither sandpapered nor polished, yet in any case, the twelve seniors who wrought it deserve judgment upon their finished job rather than upon a hastily drawn model.
And this is no mere quibbling over a nonessential. In the first place, there never was a "preliminary report." I mean to say that the Committee turned over but one report to President Hopkins, and what you have dubbed the "preliminary report" Avas merely a mimeographed questionnaire sent out to the faculty and to a selected group of undergraduates. When the Committee began its work, it became necessary that it orient itself to the task before it; and one of the methods chosen happened to be this mimeographed questionnaire. It is about this mimeographed questionnaire that you have written your editorial —not about the final report as your readers seem likely to infer.
It is important that those who are interested in the work of the Committee read your editorial with this in mind because the Committee had not gone very far when it found itself precisely at your position that "in our experiments shifting from sciences to classics, from electives to requirements, from recitations to lectures, and back again, we are dealing with secondary matters." Secondary matters to be sure; and in the Committee's final report, you will find that they are treated as nothing else but secondary matters. Moreover, the chapter on the curriculum in the finished work differs so markedly from the tentative list of studies in the questionnaire that your editorial discussion concerning it deserves qualification with the final job as the taking off place.
This chapter on the curriculum to which I refer should interest the alumni, but the essence of the Committee's work—the part ofthe report which is not a secondary matter-— has to do with the system of teaching, the plan which the Committee has proposed to replace (gradually perhaps) the lecture-recitation system now on effect. One may find this system fully outlined in Chapter Five of the published report. The Committee, I think I can say, is unanimous in its belief that the evolving of this new system constitutes its really valuable work. It remains to be seen whether or not that is so. Very likely the ALUMNI MAGAZINE has already gone over it and made up its editorial mind about it. Whether or no, either by publishing this letter or by editorial notice, I hope you will straighten out the thinking of the alumni who are interested in what the Committee has done.
Faithfully yours,
HIS EXCELLENCY SAMUEL W.McCALL
To the Editor of the Dartmouth ALUMNI MAGAZINE. Dear Sir:
Though fifty years have passed, I can still distinctly see Sam McCall as he stood up to speak in meetings of the whole college in the old chapel of Dartmouth Hall. He was always listened to with marked attention. I recall vividly the calmness, clarity, moderation, force, and wisdom with which he spoke.
He and I were associated for a time as editors of The Anvil, a rather original and excellent college periodical, founded by Fred Thayer and modelled in its editorials, however imperfectly, upon the stately New York Nation of that day. McCall frequently referred to. The Anvil in our casual meetings of later years.
As he progressed in his public life, like other Dartmouth men I felt great pride in his distinguished abilities as a scholar and writer and, above all, in his high ideals and sturdy independence. I rejoiced that good judges looked upon him as a statesman rather than a politician. At a luncheon given in his honor, I heard Charles Francis Adams say that it seemed to him (well-nigh a miracle that a man so independent and conscientious as Mr. McCall had remained so long in public life.
I have lately been reading Beveridge's Lifeof John Marshall; and I was struck by several marked resemblances between McCall's character and that of the great Chief Justice. Such, for example, were a rare combination of amiability with unfaltering courage, and of an air of indolence with the capacity for great achievement. And both men had extraordinary powers of analyzing a complicated subject and of setting forth luminously its fundamental principles.
On the day of Field Marshall Joffre's official visit to Boston, I over-heard one of Governor McCall's aides asking "When is His Excellency due to return from Cambridge ?" The title, rarely correct in our country, in this case was not only formally correct—it fitted the man.
To the memory of His Excellency, the Honorable Samuel W. McCall!
Sincerely yours,
Class of 1873.
90 Mt. Vernon St., Boston, Oct. 8, 1924.
A bend cn Tuck Drive
