Editorial Comment

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

FOLLOWING THROUGH

NEWSPAPER revelations of the supplemental gift of a million dollars by Mr. George F. Baker of New York, to finance the upkeep and operation of the splendid new library which he gave to Dartmouth College in memory of his uncle, Fisher Ames Baker '59, confirmed by both Mr. Baker and President Hopkins, afford an opportunity for congratulation. The gift must be the more welcome because the sudden addition of so vast and so nearly complete a feature of the Dartmouth plant necessarily carried with it a prodigious increase in the budget of annual expenditures which had to be met. The staff to run the Baker Library efficiently would in itself entail a great augmentation in the costs of the department, not to speak of the other numerous expenses entailed. It has been stated that it became necessary to find in some way $60,000 additional, over and above the cost of purchasing new books—which latter item is well provided for by the handsome bequest of Edwin Webster Sanborn '78. Mr. Baker's added donation of a million dollars to take care of the Library expenses is therefore most welcome and opportune. It relieves the College budget to the extent of the income from that endowment, so that the money arising from other sources need not be diverted from other uses to meet the increased cost of running so big a library.

We would say again that no single addition to the plant at Hanover has ever made a greater difference in the daily life of the College, nor has a difference ever come into being with more dramatic suddenness. Only because it affords a gratifying contrast can one look back on the days—so recent days they still are—when Wilson Hall was all the library the College had. One never went to Wilson Hall unless one had to. Its complete inadequacy to serve a college that was five or six times the size of Dartmouth when Wilson was first built handicapped every educational activity in which the faculty were engaged. All that vanished like a light mist before a strong noontide sun when the Baker Library opened its doors. The change in student habits relating to the use of books was instantaneous and has been further helped by the opening of the greater facilities of the Sanborn building devoted to the English department. Hundreds of students have regularly congregated in the rooms of the new buildings to find quiet for reading and study remote from the noises and distractions of dormitory and fraternity house—and the famous Tower Room, with its easily accessible books, its easy chairs, its facilities for enjoying a book and pipe together and its altogether admirable combination of club and cloister, has been perhaps the crowning glory. To enable the use and enjoyment of these good things without disturbing the budget of the College—which still has about all it can stagger under—Mr. Baker has provided most handsomely.

ANOTHER YEAR OF THE FUND

WITH the advent of March will come the annual campaign for the raising of the Alumni Fund on the Tucker Foundation. This year the goal set is $135,000—$5000 more than was raised last year. By this time no alumnus of Dartmouth requires any introduction to this Fund, or any exegesis of its uses and aims. It is a recognized feature of the year, a trustworthy item in the total income of the College, and it is the thing which most surely enables Dartmouth ,to carry on the great work of growth and expansion in which for several years she has been engaged.

Whether or not a new goal can be fully attained is always a problem. It was reached last year at the last moment, somewhat to the surprise of those in charge because a new and augmented goal is not invariably attained on the first trial and that one represented a very considerable advance. After all, full attainment of the amount stipulated is not the absolutely essential element, desirable as it is. It would be manifestly better to raise $133,000, even if it fell short of the goal, than it would be to raise only $130,000 and in so doing exceed an objective of only $125,000—simply because the former would give the College more actual "cash money" to use.

The annual urgence is in order to make responses not merely cordial and generous, but also prompt. Don't be too hard on your class agent, who is probably a busy man with affairs of his own to attend to, and who has to take more time away from his regular work if his classmates delay and make it necessary for him to write a multitude of follow-up letters. Surely we are all sufficiently old hands at this business now to enable us to sit down at once and write out our pledges—or, preferably, our cheques. Procrastination is the thief of time, and such a thing is all too easy to forget. That overworked slogan, "Do it now," might profitably be adopted—or some version of "Eventually—why not at once?" If we are surely going to give, we might as well say so at the first as the third time of asking. If we are not—and some really cannot—that also can be stated. The main thing for the class agent is to know where he stands with a minimum expenditure of time and postage.

The gratifying element is to know we are giving our aid to a great and growing success—not trying to pump new life into a dead thing. Nothing succeeds like success. Dartmouth has got under splendid headway and all we have to do now is keep her going strong. To bear a part in so doing isn't a duty, but a privilege—a thing to be proud of. The wind sits in the shoulder of our sail. The College is ably officered and with luck will continue to be so for years to come. Now is the time to clinch itwhile the administration is vigorous and intelligently aggressive. Therefore, God speed the Alumni Fund for 1930!

THE FOCUS OF THE'COLLEGE

THE FOCUS, if one may call it that, of Dartmouth College has lately shifted from old Dartmouth hall—which was the nearest approach to a focus in the days when it was difficult to say the College really had any—- to the new Library group. Artfully placed so that it dominates the campus and raises a beacon visible from far and near across the country, the; Baker Library is at once the appropriate and the most easily discernible college centre. An institution of learning should circle about its treasury of books, both metaphorically and actually.

But the Library does not stand alone and aloof. It is flanked on one hand by the still useful, though deplorably inadequate, Webster Hall; and on the other by the twin structures of the Sanborn Building, which houses the English department so magnificently, and the Carpenter Art Museum. These also figure worthily in the college focus, representing intellectual attainment and aspiration at their best.

By the way, the Carpenter gift at last brings into the open, after years of comparative obscurity, certain possessions of the College which have not been sufficiently familiar to the students for a generation or two. One vaguely remembers having looked—with a lack-lustre eye, alas—on the Assyrian bas-reliefs, which in ruder days reposed somewhere in Reed Hall, knowing and caring little about them. The permanent instalment of these relics of a very ancient civilization in the Carpenter building will make them universally familiar among students and visitors, who during the past 75 years or so hardly knew that they existed.

It prompts the further thought that, with the growth of the College and the extension of its scope, there has come into being a far greater interest in classical archaeology than existed forty years ago—a study which many of us did not discover to be fascinating until after graduating and embarking occasionally on the pastime of foreign travel. The actual possession of so noble a relic of an age long antedating the glory that was Greece should be an added inspiration, not only to the pursuit of the learning which relates to the civilizations preceding the Greek, but to the addition of other and equally notable possessions derived therefrom.

The gypsum tablets from Assyria are said to be the finest specimens unearthed at Ka1 ah-Nimroud during the excavations of 1847, with the single exception of the one acquired by the British Museum. They were originally carved in the Ninth century B. C. and constituted part of the wall adornment of the. palace of AssurNaser-Apal, King of Assyria—or, as his name is sometimes given, Assurnasirpal—happily reigning between 884 and 858 B. C. He was the father of the king who first brought Assyria into contact with Palestine and who figures in Biblical annals as the conqueror of Jehu and Ahab. Kalah, or Calah, was one of the royal seats; on the Tigris; and from it came much spoil in the form of carved stone to enrich the museums of the world. That Dartmouth, even in that early day when interest in archaeological discoverieswas hardly beginning among us, acquired these extremely interesting and valuable relics of a emote past was due to the energy and alertness of Professor Hubbard, who solicited he award of some part of the finds at Kalah to the College. The tablets were a long time in coming, but arrived safely in 1857 and were housed as well as might be at the moment. Now they come forth into the ken of all and sundry, as is fitting one of the most valuable possessions of Dartmouth.

It may be added that the provision of so adequate a museum for the fine arts should stimulate the effort to make the College more notable in this direction than it has been. There still is room for early acquaintance with the appreciation of the arts of painting and sculpture which most of us acquire in later years and then on the bromidic principle that we "don't know much about art, but know what we like." Dartmouth's art treasures are still too few, despite the possession of perhaps the best single collection of the portraiture by the late Joseph DeCamp in the country. It was a fortunate choice that brought Mr. DeCamp to Hanover to paint such masterly pictures as those of the late John K. Lord, or of Benjamin A. Kimball, for it set a standard worthy of emulation in such matters.

The matter of a proper memorial to Eleazar Wheelock still hangs fire, but it in turn should afford artistic inspiration. Echoing a sentiment of Dr. Tucker's, President Hopkins has long insisted that there be no unworthy monument to the founder of the College; it must be worthy, or there should be none at all save the College itself—the latter no mean memorial, for one recalls the classic epitaph of Sir Christopher Wrenn.

For such things it always pays to wait. To have built the Library, for instance, when it first began to appear as a prime necessity of the College, would undoubtedly have given us something sure to be speedily outgrown, as well as distinctly less suitable in appearance. It would be the same with Wheelock's memorial. To hasten unduly the construction of such a thing would surely be regretted; and to bestow the name on any building of less than the very first magnitude would be to fall short of doing adequate honor to the "onlie begetter" of Dartmouth.

SCHOLARSHIP THEN AND NOW

So much comment, both merry and sad, has been printed in recent years concerning the scholastic standing of fraternities that it may be in order to reproduce here the list as it figures at the moment for the achievements of the several Dartmouth fraternities in the year 1928-29. It appears to reveal a creditable advance in the intellectual activities, since even the tailender in the present list would, with the same marks, have got into the top third ten years ago. One is further informed that the leading fraternity ten years ago had an average that would make it only eleventh in the list of last year. So, apparently, the intellectual side is looking up—in spite of football over-emphasis and everything.

Last year's average rank for the entire college is stated to have risen to 2.306, as against a low record of 2.055 in 1919. Much depends, of course, on the comparative severity of the marking; but we are seriously assured by those who should know—to wit, the professors—that instead of producing this creditable rise in the scholastic level by tempering the wind to the shorn lambs, they are, if anything, marking more critically than ever in the past. The increment in excellence of scholarship is ascribed in part to the workings of the Selective Process, which has produced a higher quality of material to educate, and in part to the new arrangement of the curriculum, which has made it possible for students to choose a program of courses in which they really are interested. Interest, as we all know, is the great secret of a boy's capabilities in a classroom.

For those who grew up in a day when one's standing wasn't expressed in figures, but only in letters, such as E (Excellent), V. G. (very good) and so forth; or who, in somewhat later times, found out where they stood by means of alphabetical sequences, ranging downward from A, it may be useful to explain the currently used decimal marking on a scale headed by 4.0—which now represents the old A rank. At present 3.0 is a B average: 2.0 a C average; and 1.0 the humble D. This has been in vogue since 1915.

Therefore it would appear that when the average for the entire college, taking high and low-stand men together, is 2.306, it means that the whole student body is averaging considerably better than the so-called "gentlemen's grade," which casual students once regarded as amply sufficient for all practical purposes, since it got you by the censors without conferring any special distinction.

Then how do the 26 rival fraternities at Dartmouth stand with reference to the average of the whole college? Nineteen of them either equal that average or exceed it, and seven fall below it—although in no case so low as 2.0 which would be the old-familiar C. 'This is the list as compiled by the registrar: I—-Alpha1—-Alpha Sigma Phi 2—Pi Lambda Phi 3—Alpha Chi Rho 4—Theta Chi s—Delta5—Delta Upsilon 2.8782.8172.5662.5022.497 6—Lambda Chi Alpha 7—-Sigma Nu B—Zeta8—Zeta Psi 9—Phi Gamma Delta 10—Kappa Sigma 11—Delta Tau Delta 12—Sigma Phi Epsilon 13—Phi Kappa Sigma 14—Chi Phi 15—Theta Delta Chi 16—Sigma Alpha Epsilon 17—Alpha Tau Omega 18—Delta Kappa Epsilon 19—Sigma Chi 20—Psi Upsilon 21—Phi Sigma Kappa 22—Alpha Delta Phi 23—Phi Kappa Psi 24—Phi Delta Theta 25—Kappa Kappa Kappa 26—Beta Theta Pi 2.445 2.433 2.428 2.423 2.415 2.385 2.367 2.351 2.340 2.337 2.336 2.331 2.314 2.306 2.297 2.277 2.246 2.232 2.228 2.190 2.104

It will be noted that some of the oldest fraternities are still by no means at the top of the list, while some of the newer ones again carry off the honors; but it cannot be said that the list is indicative of a discouraging indifference—indeed it seems distinctly evidential of a steadily improving spirit. One may close the discussion by remarking that it would be unreasonable to expect much more of present-day youth than was expected of their fathers, who were very like them.

SMALL ALUMNI MEETINGS

IN the report of President Garfield to the Trustees of Williams College, recently published, an interesting suggestion is made which other colleges may well turn to account, concerning the utilization of small groups of alumni for intimate conference—an application of what is usually called the "round table" idea to alumni gatherings. The reasons for the decline of usefulness, in some directions, of the great annual meetings of college graduates for what is usually called the "annual banquet" in various large cities, are manifest. The number attending are too great to enable discussion of college affairs in detail; and the effect on representatives of the college administration, who would like to present detailed messages of policy, is likely to be discouraging. Hence the device, which Dr. Garfield says has worked very well, of supplementing the great annual dinner by summoning a selected group of representative alumni in that neighborhood for a more intimate meeting of governable size—a groupless likely to expect to be entertained and more concerned for the rational discussion of problems. The number usually gathered for this purpose is stated to have varied from 15 to 25; and in the more populous centres, such as New York, a series of six alumni round tables was held during a single season, taking representatives of a different group of classes each time. These meetings were informal. There was no speech-making, but questions and answers were freely indulged in, covering a wide range.

Those of our own alumni who have had the good fortune tune to serve at some time or another as members of the Alumni Council or to attend Secretaries' Association meetings will recognize at a glance the similarity to the Williams round table discussions. At Williams the effect is something like what it would be if a dozen of our Council meetings were held every year in different localities and with different members.

The discussions at the Williams meetings were usually stimulating and highly informative, and as a rule related to non-athletic topics, such as the proper size of the college, the best methods for controlling the same, the problems incident to choosing and retaining teachers, and especially the system of admissions. This may reveal the essential difference of tone from the ordinary big alumni meeting, where the prevailing note is pretty sure to have something to do with sports—the thing which is most generally interesting and about which alumni of every sort are fairly sure to know something, although more or less ignorant concerning administrative problems.

Now it may be a doubtful proposition that such small gatherings, repeatedly held with varying personnel in the larger centres, would be a complete substitute for the traditional mid-winter gathering of the local alumni at the banquet board. As a matter of first impression we should incline to regard them as supplementary thereto, rather than as capable of supplanting the usual annual dinner. But as the colleges have grown in size and as alumni have increased in numbers, it is quite obvious that annual dinners now are different things from what they were, say, thirty years ago. In that remote day the number assembling at the table was not unwieldy—it might be 50 or 60, where today in the case of even a small college it will ordinarily run from 500 to 1000, as Dartmouth men long familiar with such affairs in Boston or New York will acknowledge. To supplement the general dinner by resort to small local meetings devoted to real discussion of pending problems may very well be a great assistance—at least to the colleges which recognize the alumni as an integral and valued part of their entity. In Dartmouth's case the need is at least partially met by the devices of the Alumni Council and the Secretaries' Association. Always the necessity remains to translating the effect on the smaller groups to the large body of all the alumni—but the more who come into intimate contact with the college problems, the more easily knowledge of the same will be disseminated to others.