THAT OLD SWEATSHIRT TRADITION
No doubt undergraduates ought to thank the alumni for funds generously given and work cheerfully done, but frankly there is something that we are even more grateful for than those very necessary things in a long line of tradition. Perhaps in their estimation we discard too many traditions and fail to establish any worthwhile ones ourselves, but there is one that we will never discard. For that single tradition we are more thankful than for anything else.
We bow in reverence to the men who established and upheld the glorious fable about the rough and ready Dartmouth type that was always "man among men." To be truthful we don't see how they made such a good job of it, we don't see what keeps the legend from bursting about our heads any day, but we do know that we are going to do our damndest to uphold it. To the undergraduates it is one of Dartmouth's greatest heritages. Many gentlemanly institutions gain a certain type of fame for the culture of their students. In others we hear of bored sophisticates who lack the necessary amount of manly vigor. But its bitterest foe never accuses Dartmouth of harboring effete students. Strict analytical chest and biceps measurements might not uphold this belief in the prowess of the Dartmouth man of the outof-doors, but it is none the less prevalent. To watch its actual effect upon freshmen and then to recall how it affected us makes us wonder at (one of the great Hanover miracles. By the time the Harvard peerade takes place the students are as certain they can lick the world as the alumni were when they swaggered through Cambridge.
This attitude is something more than vain display. It is a proof of the confidence students have in Dartmouth and of their sincere, quiet belief in its superiority. Perhaps in individual cases the charge of conceit might be justly presented, but in a group this spirit is a worth while one which any institution would gladly establish if it could. And so when New Yorkers tell Hugh Walpole that Dartmouth College is the "most male place in America," we swell with pride and thank Fortune for this, the greatest gift that the alumni of any college could leave to its students, a characteristic reputation.
