Editorial Comment

For opinions which appear in these columns the Editors alone are responsible

THAT ALUMNI LUNCHEON

THE reader may recall that at the last meeting of the Alumni Council it was voted to suggest to the Administration of the College an important change in the program for Commencement week by the advancement of the usual alumni luncheon from its traditional place, i.e., following the Commencement exercises on Tuesday, to Monday noon—and further that the general meeting of the alumni, coupled with the traditional reception to the 50-year class, be combined with it. This appeared to the Council to be the best practical way in which to rehabilitate what has always been a most interesting feature of the Commencement season, which has suffered of late from the greater anxiety of those present to get away from Hanover. The result has been a steadily decreasing attendance at the luncheon through the desire of Commencement crowds to get on the road.

Various alternative suggestions were offered, including one to make this affair over into a 9 o'clock breakfast preceding the ball game of Monday morning; but after painstaking discussion that idea was rejected as less likely to work well than a Monday luncheon would do in practice. To have an alumni meeting with the graduating class present prior to their actual admission to alumni ranks would seem in technical ways anomalous but as a matter of fact it is not importantly so, and the great desirability of having this function largely attended seems to outweigh all other considerations.

It is disconcerting to presiding officers and invited guests to have people leaving the luncheon hall in squads, which is what has been happening lately; and those who are forced to leave are themselves losers, since so much is likely to be said, and well said, by speak- ers, including the President—who takes that opportunity for recapitulating generous gifts received by the College—that it seems a pity so many should miss it. Hence the suggestion that it would make for benefit all around if the luncheon could be advanced a day and joined with other events which likewise have suffered a sea-change of recent years, such as the general meeting of the alumni, at which certain routine matters require to be done and in which it is desirable as large a number as possible shall participate.

It is true, of course, that the great bulk of alumni business is now done by the Alumni Council—under an application of the familiar principles of representative government to a situation in which increasing numbers have operated to prevent adequate treatment at a single annual meeting, such as was regarded as sufficient in older years. None the less, there are certain functions of the General Association of Dartmouth Alumni which cannot be delegated, and it is a pity to allow them to become pro forma duties, perfunctorily performed. It seems highly proper to consolidate that meeting and the reception to the 50-year class (which is really a part of the same meeting) as well, with the meal which the College has always served at Commencement to its gathered sons. It should be a salutary change.

THEN AND NOW IN THE COLLEGES

MANY a true word is spoken in jest, and that laughing philosopher, Professor Stephen Leacock of Montreal, possibly hits a nail on the head when he reminds us that in the old days—say of Padua the student came to the university because he was burning with desire to learn, while the professor was in the university because his one passion in life was to teach. The implication is that times have changed, certainly with respect to a large proportion of the students and probably also with respect to a good many professors. The latter are, like Other men, intent on making as good a living as possible in ways that are not uncongenial. The former are flocking to the colleges in large part because everybody's doing it and father is both willing and able to pay the bills. If it were a case of making painful pilgrimage to the shrine of learning on foot or mule-back, the applications would be fewer. If all a professor could count on was what he could pick up in the way of bare sustenance from the zealous few who hung upon his words, more such men would be selling bonds and fewer would be teaching.

Not that one should quarrel too seriously with this. The old order changeth—and a very good thing, too, in its way. Learning, once monopolized by a small number of earnest men, is much more widely distributed now than it was when Padua was a mushroom college. It isn't such a rarity, and anything that is in abundant supply is likely to be somewhat cheapened. Nevertheless there is room for doing something about this, in the way of discouraging the presence of mere fashionable drones; and that is the whole idea underlying the device which at Dartmouth we call the Selective Process of Admissions, whereby the privilege of enrolling as a student is sought to be confined, as far as it may be, to those who give some slight evidence of possessing the ancient spark of desire which fired the catechumen at Padua or Bologna.

It would be rather sad, in one view of it, if the onlyprofessors available now were men who were professors solely because of an unquenchable passion to spread their own rare erudition abroad. There wouldn't be enough to fulfil the mission of the moment. Chill penury might repress their noble rage and freeze the genial current of the soul. It was all very well once for the professor to live on herbs and simples, but it wouldn't do now. Still, one does reasonably desire, as in the other case, a spark of the ancient enthusiasm for learning's own sweet sake, and not too much of the commercializing instinct which must to some degree attend any profession, however learned, in these days.

THE ENTERING CLASS

RECENT analysis of the entering class (1933) as published in this MAGAZINE reveals the usual array of interesting facts, but perhaps the most significant are the trends of a geographical nature which in Dartmouth's case seem to reveal a slight progressive decrease in attendance from New England, coupled with a slight progressive increase in attendance from other sections of the country. If the attitude of the college authorities is correctly comprehended, this is in the line of what has been desired and fostered, with the general idea of reducing the preponderantly sectional character of the student body.

Many of us recall the time when Dartmouth was credited with drawing primarily on New Hampshire for its undergraduates. That ceased long ago to be the case, and Massachusetts became a preponderating factor soon to be rivalled and ultimately surpassed by New York. Naturally the College still draws heavily on those states and on the rest of New England as well, despite the plethora of New England colleges, although in the special case of New Hampshire the rise to eminence of the one-time Agricultural college to something like the estate of a state university, coupled with the great increase in the tuition fees at Dartmouth, has produced an augmented pull in other directions for boys living in that state. Meantime the broad territory of the United States and the increasingly widespread character of Dartmouth alumni is evidently leading toward a more truly national character for the undergraduate body and it is a thing which may well be fostered and increased by the Selective Process as indeed was the deliberate design.

One may pass over as of less real importance the summaries of intended future activities which freshmen reveal in filling out official questionnaires, because it is by no means a common thing for boys of 18 or less to know with anything like certainty what they intend to do for a living after they graduate. Similarly there is little that is likely to be very vital in their statements of religious preference. More importance inheres in the analyses of family provenance. In the most recent summaries there is, as we recall it, evidence that the number of sons of college-bred mothers is increasing a wholly natural result from the fact that college-bred mothers are vastly more numerous than they were years ago.

A CHANCE FOR MEMORIALS

ANEW avenue for the use of memorial funds has been opened up, it appears, by the development of Dick's House at Hanover for the use of ailing students, or convalescents—the magnificent but homelike resort erected by Edward K. Hall '92 in memory of his son, Dick Hall '27, who died in his sophomore year. This beautiful house, now familiar to all visitors in Hanover as an immediate adjunct of the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, fills a want which in most colleges is supplied under the forbidding and distasteful name of an "infirmary," but does it in a way which is so different that it might almost seem to put a premium on illness. At all events it goes far to rob sickness of its terrors, and an inspection of Dick's House has come to be one of the things that the visitor in Hanover must on no account omit.

The provision of this practical memorial is one thing and its upkeep is another. Naturally the use of such a house entails a considerable expense which must be met, and further it must be open without restraint to every student of the College who stands in need of its ministrations, whether he can or cannot bear the cost himself. To meet this contingency there has begun to gather a nucleus of memorial funds, ranging from $10,000 down, the income from which will be employed to defray expenses in such cases as cannot be met otherwise; a sort of endowment, in short, which admits of almost infinite expansion with the progress of time. These funds as at present constituted include memorials for various people—notably the parents of Mr. and Mrs. Hall, these representing an additional gift by the donors of the House itself, but extending also to several other generous benefactors who have seized this opportunity to supplement the gifts of Mr. and Mrs. Hall by adding memorial funds of their own.

The suggestion is therefore obvious that in this lies an opportunity for classes in quest of some suitable method of memorializing their members, whether singly or in groups, as well as for individuals anxious to provide an enduring testimony to those dear to them, since such additions need in no case be of great magnitude. Indeed there already exists among the memorial endowments already provided a general fund, subject to additions at any time in amounts unspecified, which is highly desirable for those of us who may be eager to do something to help along the usefulness of Dick's House, but who can hardly afford the $1000 or $5000 that would justify a wholly separate and distinctively named fund.

Mention of this phase of the matter has been printed in an earlier issue of this MAGAZINE, and it has also been adequately treated in a handsome volume published by Mr. Hall himself with reference to the memorials already constituted. The intent of this present article is merely to emphasize the existence of this opportunity and heartily to commend it to the consideration of all who have been casting about for some way, at once useful and satisfying to the heart, for perpetuating the memory of someone dear to them who has gone hence.

HARKING BACKWARD

IT WAS time some scholar arose to defend the beleaguered citadel of athletics, and the man appears to have been found in the person of Professor John A. Scott of Northwestern University, a teacher of Greek. His defense first appeared in the well-known St. Nicholas magazine for the young, but is reprinted with approval in the Northwestern Alumni News for November. In it the professor has the temerity to remind the intellectual world that for a thousand years or so the Greeks were guilty of the most monumental overstressing of athletics the world ever saw, and yet surprisingly forfeited nothing of their intellectual power. As a matter of fact the results were quite the contrary; and to the Greece of the Golden Age, when the Olympian victors were the men whom Hellas most delighted to honor, we owe pretty nearly everything that is worth while in the field of intellectual effort. Possibly there is in this a crumb of reassurance for such as feel that a worship of athletic prowess threatens the very foundations of education in America.

That Greece carried her worship of bodily vigor and grace to an extreme is undoubted. There were games on several notable sites, but the chief were held at Olympia throughout a period of time amazing in its extent. For a thousand years the recurrent festivals, four years apart, drew record throngs from the four corners of the Mediterranean, then constituting all the known world that really counted for much. Grim visag'd War had to suspend for the games, indeed Greece once risked her all and sacrificed Leonidas and his Three Hundred mainly to gain the time required to celebrate the Olympic festival. The winner of the games became the chief citizen of his home town, for whom no higher honor remained to be won save a possible apotheosis. Homer felt that "no greater glory was open to a man" than such as he obtained by physical prowess; and what we know of Pindar rests chiefly on two-score of odes composed in honor of Olympic victors. The recurring Olympiad afforded the only calendar of the day. So important was this athletic contest that Greece maintained a complete record for 996 years of the winners of the 200-yard dash—a record to the revision of which the great Aristotle felt it no indignity to devote his time and abilities. Plato, Euripides and others were in their day winners of athletic events and had the grace to be proud of it.

Not only this, but the professor goes on to point out that the periods of intellectual supremacy which various Greek states enjoyed coincided with their eras of supremacy at Olympia. Sparta's intellectual life dawned early and withered away, but was at its prime in the years before she abandoned athletics for militarism and the rude manner of life for which ultimately she became famous. Athens was at her zenith of intellectual glory in the years during which she figured most prominently as the residence of Olympic victors, and the same was subsequently true of Alexandria in Egypt. Was this pure coincidence? Or was it cause and effect? In any event the facts are so; and one may at least infer that athletics, although exalted as never before or since, certainly did not undermine the intellectual activity of the day.

There will be objections, of course. It will be remembered that there was in all this some content of religion, as well as of sport; that professionalism was never dreamed of; that the actual prizes obtained by the individual were mere crowns of wild olive; that there were no Sunday newspapers to blazon abroad in more or less faulty Greek the personalities of the contestants. None the less it seems that Professor Scott makes a pretty good case for some of our modern intelligentsia to consider when disposed to bemoan the high estate of the athlete among collegians. That Greece would have attained her heights if her citizens had cultivated their bodily vigor by secret devotion to the Daily Dozen in the seclusion of the home seems remotely possible, rather than inherently probable.

There will probably be some to assert that sound sense is not to be looked for from professors of Greek and that one must turn for real light to the departments of Banking and Accountancy. But one with a secret liking for intercollegiate sport may be pardoned for feeling that a blow has been struck with much adroitness on the side of such games and that there is evidence for the direct value of athletic sports as the companion and adjutant of mental greatness. To cap the climax, Professor Scott quotes Scripture to his purpose, citing the many athletic tropes to be found in the writings of the stalwart St. Paul; and he concludes by reminding his readers that athletics in Greece, as with us, stand for democracy, self-control, honesty, patience and temperance, without which virtues our intellect is vain.

By the way, there is need of a literary Supreme Court to decide whether "athletics" should be considered a singular or a plural word, along with similar terms, such as politics, ethics, mathematics, at id om. Professor Scott prefers the theory that the word is plural, saying always "athletics are" rather than "athletics is." Somehow it does suit better the demands of the ear, even to one who would as naturally say "mathematics is a difficult subject."

SAMUEL L. POWERS

AMONG the loyal and influential alumni who served with President Tucker in the days of Dartmouth's development, Samuel L. Powers was pre-eminent. The imagination of the undergraduate of a generation ago, looking out on the alumni world, was fired by this group who seemed to typify Dartmouth, successful in their professional work, useful in their communities, and devoted to the interests of Dartmouth.

Not least in this outstanding group was Mr. Powers. He entered Dartmouth in its day of small things and assisted in its realization of growth undreamed of fifty years ago. Of distinguished service to his city and state throughout the whole of his active life, he still found time to serve on the Board of Trustees of the College for ten years, during the critical period of transition when President Tucker was passing the helm of leadership to other hands.

Mr. Powers was always a welcome speaker on Dartmouth occasions and many alumni will remember his witty and forceful remarks on the occasion of some Dartmouth night during their undergraduate days, or at an alumni dinner in later years.

His ability in public speech was equalled by his facility in writing. One of his alumni speeches, that at the Boston dinner in 1922, has been preserved in pamphlet form under the title, "Character Sketches of Dartmouth Men." Among the characters depicted were three natives of Cornish, New Hampshire—Philander Chase, Nathan Smith, and Salmon P. Chase. Mr. Powers might have added another to this group of distinguished sons of Cornish, in his own person.

This MAGAZINE has been indebted to Mr. Powers as a contributor to its pages on more than one occasion and in one volume, that of 1923-24, he contributed no less than four articles—one on his classmate, Samuel W. McCall, and three on "Dartmouth in the Seventies."

A more extended estimate of Mr. Powers' life and services to his time will appear in a later issue of this MAGAZINE. The editors will only record here their deep sense of loss in the passing of one who meant much in the life of his state, city and college.

Eric P. Kelly '06 Feature Editor of the Magazine BEFORE coming to Dartmouth as an instructor in English in 1921, Eric Kelly enjoyed wide experience as a newspaper man, first with the Springfield Union and later with the Boston Herald and Boston Transcript. IN 1925-26 he was A Lektor in English in the University of Krakow, Poland, following three years of work, 1918-21, with the Polish Legions in France and Poland. The results of his Polish experiences are seen in numerous short stories and particularly in "The Trumpeter of Krakow," which received the Newbery Medal in 1929, as the best children's book written by an American during 1928, SERVING his apprenticeship in the Department of English he is now Professor of Journalism and constitutes his own department. Best of all, he has been willing to devote his editorial talents to this MAGAZINE and much that pleases in the make-up and content of the new MAGAZINE is due to his skill and imagination.