NATION WRITER SURPRISED BY DARTMOUTH TOLERANCE
In an article on "Liberalism in the Colleges" in the Nation for September 17, Paul Blanshard cites Dartmouth as an example of a private institution controlled by trustee business men which is nevertheless liberal. In part Mr. Blanshard says:
Dartmouth is today one of the outstanding examples of liberalism in college administration. Its president, Ernest Martin Hopkins, has repeatedly taken a militant stand in behalf of free speech. "If turning handspring's on top of the college gymnasium would teach men to think," he told me, "I would be perfectly willing to do it." When William Z. Foster was invited by the Dartmouth Round Table to speak on the left-wing movement of labor, President Hopkins said: "Personally I am opposed to Foster. I think that he has not used his influence and power wisely and has sometimes misled his followers, but the students can hear him in a college hall if they wish provided they raise the money to bring him to Dartmouth without my cooperation."
In a number of ways Dartmouth is injecting a new spirit into the classroom. Students in its labor-problems classes are not compelled to listen exclusively to one professor summing up all "sides" of the industrial struggle in a fruitless attempt to be impartial. They have had the opportunity of listening during the past two years to such speakers as James A. Emery, counsel for the National Association of Manufacturers; Matthew Woll of the American Federation of Labor; Julia O'Connor of the telephone workers of Boston; Robert Amory, president of the National Association of Cotton Manufacturers; John L. Barry, president of the New Hampshire Federation of Labor; J. Eads Howe, and many other leaders in industrial struggles. In the compulsory course for freshmen the students are plunged into the middle of the controversies concerning the Negro problem, disarmament, socialism, and the League of Nations by readings from current periodicals and newspapers. Here again the effort is to place before the students cross-sections of the world as it actually is, a world of biased judgments and inflamed prejudices.
Although Dartmouth is by no means a radical institution (it has no avowed Socialists on its faculty), its policy is so much more progressive than that of institutions like Michigan and Pennsylvania that the outsider is likely to ascribe the policy to an unusual board of trustees. As a matter of fact the list of Dartmouth trustees reads like a page from "The Goose Step"; Lewis Parkhurst, treasurer of Ginn and Co.; Henry B. Thayer, president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Co.; Albert O. Brown of the Amoskeag Savings Bank; Prof. John K. Lord, former professor of Latin; Dr. John M. Gile, surgeon; Henry L. Moore, retired treasurer of the Minnesota Loan and Trust Co.; Harry H. Blunt, (now deceased) treasurer of the Wonalancet Co.; Clarence B. Little, president of the First National Bank of Bismarck, North Dakota; Fred H. Howland, president of the National Life Insurance Co.; Governor Fred H. Brown, and Charles G. Du Bois, president of the Western Electric Co. That such a board of trustees can control a genuinely progressive educational institution is proof that no generalization about capitalist control of our universities can explain all the reaction and suppression.
