Editorial Comment

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

THE FUTURE FRATERNITIES

DR. RAY LYMAN WILBUR, Secretary of the Interior in President Hoover's cabinet—the presence of a California Wilbur in the cabinet seems to have come almost to be a Law—spoke interestingly, if not altogether convincingly, at the Interfraternity Conference held in New York .last autumn of the modern fraternity as it appears to him. Not being himself a fraternity man and looking at the problem of the Greek letter societies from the angle of a great far-western university, Secretary Wilbur's views might very well be expected to diverge somewhat from those of other men; and yet of course, speaking in a council of all the fraternities, it could hardly be expected that he would outline anything downright hostile to the fraternity idea. As a matter of fact he did not. But he indicated a belief that with the changes in the nature of the colleges the fraternities could scarcely be expected to avoid coincident changes which we should say was rather an obvious probability."

One may pass over as of small importance his ascription of the rise of fraternities from an attempt to solve the housing and boarding problem in earlier days; but there will be many who will question the entire accuracy of that. It seems more likely that it was merely the inevitable out flowering of man's club instinct, taking the shape that was natural in a day when the colleges were exclusively cultural.

What more concerns us is the sweeping dictum that "the American college, as such, is on the wane. ' That arresting statement appears to mean only that the oldfashioned four-year cultural college—the Liberal Arts college is fading out before the demand for junior colleges and universities. The speaker evidently looks for a, period in which the four-year colleges will be very few, and in which the great universities will receive a considerable proportion of their students with the beginning of the junior year. This, one is told, will impose a different problem on the fraternities, hitherto accustomed to cover four years—or three at the least—of continuous college membership. Beyond doubt it will, if it happens, and it is by no means unlikely that it will happen, as the demand for accelerated pace continues its perfect work. Men are very likely to insist that four years is too long a time to devote to a liberal preparation for specialized university study, and compel the more general adoption of a combination which cuts the liberal culture period down to two years and then jumps into professional study at what used to be junior year. Dr. Wilbur seems pretty sure this will come to pass and insists that the fraternities must reckon with it, making themselves more attractive to young men who have passed the adolescent period and have entered upon the more serious preparation for a definite professional career. Hence his demand that more Reality, with the traditional big R, be put into fraternity life, because that is what serious young men want. A hint was conveyed that maybe the fraternities have grown a thought too boyish and too little concerned for human dignity. In a word, fraternities may have to shape themselves to fit the somewhat longer period—say five years—covered by the conjunction of junior-college and university study.

A painstaking rereading of Dr. Wilbur's address leaves us with the vague impression that he seemed to be saying a lot while saying very little. The old-style fraternities originally went in strongly for the heavy dignity, and in later years seem largely to have lost it. Aggrieved alumni have striven with the active delegations to prove that some of the old notions might well return which stressed scholastics rather than athletics, and literary or oratorical, rather than pure'y social, activities; but exceedingly little has ever come of this, so far as we have heard, and it seems probable that the college societies will go on adapting themselves to what those who compose them conceive they want a purely natural process rather than a forced recognition of impending stresses and strains.

The college fraternity is whatever its time requires it to be. It served our elders in one form, and it serves the present era in quite another. Very likely it will perform still other functions for those who come later. There is comparatively little need to do any preaching about it, because preaching in such cases is likely to be ineffectual. Nature will take its course, and fraternities will conform or will die a natural death if that is what circumstances require.

Despite the admonition that the American college, as such, is on the wane, we hope to see Dartmouth continue for some years yet as a four-year liberal arts college, unhurried by the demand for speed and indifferent to the pell-mell demands of bustling state universities eager to teach everything from the classics to carpentry. As for the fraternities, they will probably work out their own salvation by affording to young men what young men really do want, rather than what they are told they ought to want. They always have, and there appears to be good reason for supposing that they always will.

THE UNFETTERED GIFT

EVERY now and then it is desirable to stress the need which every educational institution feels in about equal degree for an absence of too strict definiteness on the part of benefactors concerning the specific uses to be made of the money which such give or bequeath. Not that the specific gifts are ever likely to be refused because of their restriction to certain definite uses, of course. But it remains a fact that every college is in need of some latitude in the use of funds, and that not one of them fails to rejoice when some generous friend or alumnus bestows a substantial sum of money with the welcome words, "Use it for whatever you think best." As President Hopkins put it at a recent informal gathering of Dartmouth men, every college has abundant uses for "loose change"; i.e., for money that is free to be employed on any work that may suddenly become imperative or desirable to do; and yet that is one of the things that most often cause embarrassment. Givers are likely to have restricted their gifts to ends that interest them, sometimes regardless of the greater need for doing something else.

This is perhaps not so likely to apply to gifts of the very first magnitude, which are usually made after due conferences with the administration. But it does apply to the multitude of less imposing benefactions, which come along in increasing volume throughout the year and which in the aggregate are of very important amount. These also are likely to be given for definite ends, rather than as general funds for any purpose that comes along; indeed that is quite natural since the frequent desire is to make such funds a permanent memorial to someone, and that end is best served by a concrete scholarship foundation, or special department building, or other specific work—usually something which the College can very well use, but often a thing which could be postponed much better than other works which it is more pressing should be done.

It is therefore suggested that intending givers consider the idea of making such bestowals devoid of conditions where possible, trusting to the administration to find the most useful way of expending them.

THE REVOLT FROM TYPE

FOLLOWING an upheaval in colleges and universities a few years ago when college men and women decided that a prevailing type of person in any collegiate atmosphere was undesirable there comes a quite definite protest from graduating students against being moulded into distinct types after graduation. It used to be thought the acme of success for a struggling young business man to look like a prosperous banker, or for a beginner in some mercantile enterprise to look like the "man higher up." The aping of superiors has of course gone on since the beginning of the world but the modern protest of college people against such aping seems to be rather well distributed. An officer of the college has held many interviews with students in the senior class, and finds that the most serious of them protest against any kind of typism in life after college. Sinclair Lewis has made "Babbittry" a byword, even in college communities, and the example of the ape-man who smokes standard smokes, and swears standard oaths, and wears standard clothes, and lives in standard houses is the bugaboo of us all.

The students have expressed to some degree their dislike of standardized personalities. Men come to instructors saying that they wish to teach but don't want to grow into teacher types. One student went so far as to call the type a "pedant type." "You can pick out a teacher anywhere you see him" said one boy. Another student who had newspaper work in mind objected to the "reporter type"—an impression which, by the way, he obtained from a play called the "Front Page.'" Men who have worked at police headquarters for most papers disagree heartily with the author of the Front Page, but that has nothing to do with this problem. Another student disliked the office man type of a large corporation. The "tricks in every trade" somehow come to leave their impressions upon most tradesmen. Indeed the mental concepts, true or false which we apply to members of various professions or trades, somehow influence us all in our thinkings and speculations. But on the whole it seems quite a healthy attitude for the college man to assume upon graduation, that he will endeavor to preserve his own personality in a world of work where speed, competition, and mass product work against individuality. One can do it without being disagreeable or offish. Nothing seems to rate a higher place in business enterprise than a personality which has survived the preliminary struggles, and the choice between being a colorless "desk man" and a man free to exercise his own individuality can often be made in the first two or three years following graduation. There used to be a wise saw to the effect that "no man should be too good for his job," but the truth of the matter is that unless a man realizes that he is too good for a certain job he will never rise above that particular job.

STILL WORKING WELL

THE newspapers of the country have had more or less to say by way of comment on the item of news originating at Hanover which stated that of this year's freshman class, numbering well over 500 men at the opening of the year, it had been found necessary to drop only eleven, after the tests of the first semester had been made and tabulated, for deficiences of scholarship. It surprised no one, however, familiar with the recent trend of the "mortality" curve at Dartmouth. For several years past the tendency of the line has been steadily downward, fewer and fewer instances of poor scholarship being found, although to say the least no tendency toward more lenient marking has existed.

That it is a further evidence of the efficacy of the Selective Process of admitting students appears axiomatic. The improvement began with the adoption of that system; and it has grown in magnitude as familiarity with it has increased the efficiency of its operation, both at Hanover and among the alumni whose advance investigations of applicants have so much to do with eliminating unpromising material. The longer this method obtains, the less defensible appears the old system of making admission to a college depend on the result of a single set of examination papers—a result which might be attributable to luck, to possible evasion of espionage, or to feverish cramming, quite as reasonably as to a genuine intellectual attainment on the part of the examinee. Dartmouth remains far from an easy college to get into, and far from an easy college to stay in after admission; but the progressive decline of the figures for separation because of scholastic failures certainly indicate in a startling way that those who do manage to get in succeed far better in remaining than they used to do when other standards of admission were employed.

A NEW FORM OF SCHOLARSHIP

REGIONAL scholarships of substantial amount are being founded at Dartmouth, thanks to a series of liberal recent gifts. These, as yet limited in number, may well increase as the idea becomes popular with men and women of means and philanthropic propensities. The pioneer gifts have been made by Mrs. W. P. Johnson of California ($100,000 in memory of her late husband, Wm. P. Johnson '80) and by a bequest of $117,000 by Charles F. Brooker of Ansonia, Connecticut. Two freshman students from each of those states will be chosen on the basis of apparent promise to receive next year, and for the four years of their course, scholarships of $700 a year. In addition, two similar scholarships will be created for New Hampshire students from the income of the timber-cutting on the Second College Grant—a tract of woodland in far northern New Hampshire given to the College in 1807. Such a system admits of indefinite expansion, and with the rise in tuition fees is doubly desirable as an insurance against having such rise operate to confine college education to the rich alone. It is, therefore, both to be hoped and expected that wealthy donors in other states will add to these already established regional funds for the financial aid of boys from their several localities.

Revision of the system of awarding such aid is being considered by a faculty committee—indeed the system of awarding all scholarships is under discussion with a view to insuring the most advantageous disposition of such funds among men who seriously need them and will make the worthiest use thereof.

HOUSING RELICS

To what has been said elsewhere and recently concerning museums at Dartmouth should be added a word concerning the new uses of Wilson Hall, long the College Library but now converted to a College Museum. In addition to the half-legendary Nineveh reliefs, which few in other years had ever seen, or even heard about, are added various collections—geological, metallurgical, biological and ethnological—and those famous topographical maps of New Hampshire and Vermont in relief, made years ago by the late Professor Charles H. (Type) Hitchcock, which, if memory serves, once hid themselves modestly in Culver.

There are also some interesting aggregations of Indian relics, stone-age implements, pottery and arrowheads. Most interesting of all, perhaps, is the ancient stage-coach which in more primitive years toiled up and down the hill between Hanover and the Norwich station, not to mention its service in jocund excursions to fraternity banquets at divers suburban resorts. In short, Wilson Hall has become a repository of articles of interest, not exclusively objets d'art, which no college should be without. One should also mention the un- usual collection of mounted specimens of various fishes —chiefly varieties of trout and salmon—assembled by the late Edwin W. Sanborn, the donor of the Sanborn building adjacent to the Baker Library. These are in large measure the trophies of Mr. Sanborn's personal prowess with rod and line.

All these features taken together constitute a nucleus for a sort of Natural History Museum which in time may grow to require more adequate housing than Wilson Hall can furnish; but at the moment it seems a most desirable way to utilize the structure from which the books so lately moved away to new and more palatial quarters.

RUS IN URBE

IT is perhaps an effort on the part of large urban universities to revive some of the advantages that inhere in the small-town or rural college that is represented by such expedients as the so-called Harkness plan for housing small groups of students, in units carefully chosen to give a cross section in each of the whole university life. The same problem, at all events, does not arise in the smaller institutions; and that it finds so eager a response in the cases of Harvard and Yale may be attributed to the lively consciousness of those major aggregates of academic life that there really is something of advantage in compactness and small numbers, which a great and scattered college population is sure to miss.

We have not the same problems at Hanover. There is virtually no building of great importance to the daily life of the College that is more than two or three hundred yards from the natural centre—which we call the Campus, following an ancient tradition, although its other name, the Common, is doubtless coeval with it. Dartmouth comes naturally by her compactness and needs not to have it manufactured for her. The one respect in which she may be said to have a question demanding a better solution than is at present possible is that which relates to the provision of daily food. The eating problem, rather than the housing problem, is acute. We have no necessity to simulate rural conditions in a city atmosphere, in order to bring the whole body of students into intimate contact; but we have to face the intricate matter of dealing with our boarding-places and the provision of some adequate social centre which shall be accessible and useful to all.

Dartmouth has always, and we believe wisely, opposed the practice of supplying meals in fraternity houses, thus forestalling one element that would infallibly intensify social cliques. There survives to this day, by virtue of necessity, the eating club system (by which name one dignifies the boarding-house) that obtained in the days of the fathers—supplemented by official "commons" available to a very limited number, and by private and official lunchrooms of the cafeteria type. The whole system leaves a great deal to be desired and is understood to be engrossing the attention of the administrators of Dartmouth affairs.