Outing Club Administration

WOULD your business be organized if the whole personnel—from the chairman of the board to the man who distributes soap and towels through your buildings—walked out on you in the spring of every year, and stayed out?

Would your hair thin out around the temples if that same chairman of your board was ambitious—and yet to see his 21st birthday—if a M voting majority of your Directors could muster not one man eligible to cast a ballot in the local primaries?

With your sympathy, then, let a graduate comptroller describe the organization of the Dartmouth Outing Club.

First, it's decentralized. I mean it—decentralized. There's no king-pin, there's no one throne from which authority broadens out and down in decreasing scales of responsibility. There are ten such thrones—ten kingpins annually.

Director of Cabins and Trails Director of Membership and Instruction Director of Secretariate Director of Trips Director of Winter Sports Director of Winter Carnival—and his Tribal Chieftains Director of Carnival Ball Director of Carnival Publicity Director of Carnival Competitions Director of Carnival Outdoor Evening

With every new college year, these ten monarchs come into office. Into each pair of hands goes a two-edged weapon, with which the strong and ambitious can clear the circle of his department's independence, but which brings his own destruction to the irresponsible or careless director. This armament is his department Budget.

The first task of each director is to call together all his minions, to consult his friends, to pore over statements and the Club's cash book, and so to think his year's program into dollars and cents. With his wants on paper in his hand, the director goes to Council budget meetings and does battle for his plans. The Club's annual income of approximately $12,000 is the bootyand the Council, suddenly gone conservative, flail each other's impractical and wild-eyed schemes from consideration and off the budget sheet. From this meeting each director returns to his department with an appropriation commensurate to his prowess. The largest single department budget for 1930-1931 is $2,478. His weapon so forged, the director goes to work. As long as he shows ability and as long as his department proves its own financial security, there is practically no interference from chairman, or from graduate comptroller.

When not only department products but also monthlyfinancial statements show repeated incompetence, the Council of student directors hits as ruthlessly as the largest corporate organization—the offender's resignation is requested.

That doesn't mean that every surviving D. O. C. director is competent. They blunder; get completely lost; hardly ever, to the day they graduate, grasp the importance of being accurate or specific to the degree that they'll have to be to draw pay-checks from the day they pack their graduation suitcase and take the White River bus. The Outing Club, it is rumored, has earned its reputation as inefficient in the high-speed sense of that word. But I'm being critical because the D. O. C. is my Family. All student organizations have a good big skeleton of inefficiency in the office cabinet.

Ah, then a graduate-controlled, graduate-managed organization, with a trained and salaried staff large enough to administer the fifty-seven varieties of Outing Club activities—that would give Dartmouth an even stronger Outing Club? No sir, it would not. It couldn't even give the College as vigorous a Club as has graced the campus for the last four years.

The Outing Club's ponderous machinery turns to a constant pressure of enthusiasm, foolhardy notions, loyalty, ambition and hot air. All things under the sun are new to the man flexing his muscles at the age of twenty, and nothing quite so enticing as authority and a chance to execute his plans.

Student organizations come and go on the Campus, but that's because their usefulness is for a season and the loyalty they attract is to values intangible or fleeting

The Outing Club seems to have its roots deep in usefulness, and in loyalties that are traditional to people this side of the Atlantic. Officers incompetent, officers petty, officers destructive, can't kill the Outing Clubindeed can't even check it. There is a steady stream of young giants anxious to take over the reins and improve on the failures of their predecessors.

The Outing Club demands much of its men—time and money as well as loyalty. The average D. O. C. director puts in more time than the average athletic manager at his activity. He receives no salary for hours longer than the publication boards spend at their desks.

The Campus rewards and the personal satisfaction attendant on high achievement in the Outing Club are obvious. And in some pride I've wondered if any two courses in the curriculum can match the lessons in values of ideas, in marching out with resources at your back, in conflict and compromise that are learned in office classrooms of the D. O. C. suite in Robinson HalL There are two Dartmouth Outing Clubs. There is the Club of 125 busy men that I've written about—men who turn the wheels and man the desks. But there is another Outing Club that never sees the Robinson Hall offices. It's the Club of 1,400 members who pay their $2.00 a year, use their cabins, go on the trips, ski on the trails, smoke in the Club House lounge. Their concern is that the Cabins be clean, the trips well led, the trails well bushed. These things are their rights. It is the duty of the 125 busy men to fill their wants.

Right here is eternal trouble, and here too is the ballast that steadies the ship in stormy water.

The Club of 125 would go galloping of! astride their own schemes—but that the Club of 1,400 hollers, "Hey, we want clean towels in the Cabins." The Club of 125 would be the theoretical and impractical Experimental School for Young Executives, except that the 1,400 men clamor for better trails, for satisfactory maps and handbooks, for competent leadership and good equipment on mortally dangerous winter mountain trips.

Since 1926 the scope of the Dartmouth Outing Club has increased most noticeably. The Club is no sooner clothed with offices, with income, with equipment, than it begins to stretch the seams and the sleeves grow short at the wrists. How far or fast it will go not one person in Hanover dares to say.

DANIEL P. HATCH, JR. Comptroller, Dartmouth Outing Club