The Opening Address of Dartmouth's 162nd Year

A FREQUENTLY recurring event such as the opening of the college year may become so familiar that its significance will be obscured and sense of its importance will be lost. It is in definite effort to avoid such losses in perception and in sensibility as tend to dull understanding that this convocation of students and faculty is held year by year.

When men assemble by the hundreds from widely scattered communities, long distances apart, for association under the auspices of a specific institutional influence, there must be some common denominator of motive, even if conception of this be vague and definition of it be inarticulate. The influence which the American college strives to exert is to stimulate a desire for education among those associated with it. Let us then consider for a little time some aspects of higher education and the educative process of the liberal college.

In the beginning, what of the popular conceptions in regard to college life? A distinguished artist once explained to me the superiority of a skillfully painted portrait over the best photograph which could be made. The photograph, he said, was the reproduction of an ephemeral expression, which might or might not be frequent, but the well-painted portrait was the composite of hundreds of expressions reflecting constantly varying moods. Consequently, he said, the more completely a portrait represented the common denominators of the qualities and moods of the whole man, the less likely it was to be a likeness of him in any specific appearance.