NEW COLLEGE RESPONSIBILITIES

The President's Address at the Opening of College

ONE HUNDRED and sixty-three years ago the first class entered Dartmouth College. From then until now, without intermission, a new class has been enrolled annually. Always, doubtless, there has been some change in conditions of life from one college year to another. So it was, certainly, during the War for Independence, in which the Colonies became a Nation; so it was again during the Civil War; so it was much later during the World War. But in all the history of the College, conditions in our own country have never undergone such fundamentally radical and vital changes in a twelvemonth as in the year past. It may well be that history will record that within the college generations of our own time greater transformation of circumstances under which human life is lived has taken place than had occurred in any century before. Today, perhaps, no more important function of the College exists than to interpret the significance of the particular span of life which is ours.

In his Footnote on Greatness, Philip Guedalla reflects on the tragedy of great men who miss the period when greatness can be utilized. "The man without the moment," he says, "is as futile as the moment without the man is pathetic, an empty pause in history."

I have spoken to the College before on this point, in reference to youth of contemporary times. No man of present generations needs fear a stagnation in flow of events that will make any greatness to which he can attain superfluous. There is a maxim among yachtsmen that the leading boat gets the break of wind and tide. Some analogous statement could be made of men who have mastered knowledge, developed intelligence, and cultivated good will toward their fellows in major degree. They are less affected by adverse fate and by cumulative misfortune than others, and oh the other hand to them come opportunities for achievement and success in accomplishment greater than to others.

A year ago I spoke of change as opportunity. Today I speak of it as necessity. The only thing on which practically all men agree is that we could not have remained as we were. Yet each change precipitates the necessity for countless others, and thus the problems of life multiply in geometrical ratio. Disraeli said years ago, "Change is inevitable in a progressive country, change is constant." If he were writing today, he would have to say that change is cumulative.

WE ARE JUST beginning to understand what a complex structure is the civilization we have built and how involved is the organization of our society. For instance, when our Government assumes the necessary responsibility of regulating the economic life of the country, it finds, in place of the simple barter of former times, industry and trade specialized and subdivided into thousands of different forms and classifications, with diversity of purpose and wide variety of established procedures between one and another. When our Government accepts the theory that financial inflation is indispensable for the public good, it meets the problem of whether inflation should be accomplished by the issuance of new paper money, by the monetization of silver, by the deflation of the dollar, by credit expansion, or by some of many other devices. When, for producing new employment, it wisely encourages new capital expenditures for replacing obsolete machinery, it nevertheless faces the dilemma that new investment inevitably tends toward labor-saving machinery, which, in turn, will increase unemployment. So one might enumerate almost without end.

Theories of education, concepts of religion, conventions of morality, interpretations of history, hypotheses of economics, axioms of science, and formulas of politics, all are in the melting pot together in process of distilling down to a new essence of living. Whatever uncertainties exist, we may at least be sure that the dominating factors in the development of the civilization of the future will be new. It is as a unit in the group that the individual of the future is to be important, and not, as in a simpler society, in his own right.

It is an interesting speculation in regard to the Constitution of the United States whether what some have thought an inadvertence or lack of foresight on the part of its authors has not come to be the basis of its continued life. When the forefathers of the Republic, assembled in Constitutional Convention, interpolated into the original grant of powers the provision authorizing legislation and appropriation of public moneys "for the general welfare," they neutralized in large part the restrictions upon governmental authority which they had set up elsewhere throughout that historic document. Nevertheless, whether wittingly or not, they anticipated conditions which would have destroyed that charter, had it been without these words. They may, indeed, have provided the elasticity by which revolution could take place peacefully under the Constitution instead of by violence in its overthrow.

As in the state and in the church, so in the college, emphasis upon the formerly-held tenets of personal rights and personal immunities must be subordinated to safeguarding principles deemed to affect the general welfare at large. Let us make no mistake in faculty or student body concerning this matter, as related to higher education. Concentration upon the advancement of the general welfare is of first importance. Adjustment to the requirement for emphasis upon this makes education more indispensable than it was even for conditions existent before.

EDUCATION IS a fundamental need of mankind. Without it an individual cannot find fullness of satisfaction in personal life or attain capacity for major usefulness to his fellows. Without it society deteriorates. It is a continuing process from the cradle to the grave, and it is a varying process, according to its stage and according to the nature of the time in which it operates. The more involved becomes life, the more vitally education is required to prepare for it and the more quality is required in education. At certain stages modern society has provided institutions to give education definition and form. The college is such an institution. Always, among many objectives, education seeks first enlargement of mind and receptivity of spirit. At what points mental powers can be most advantageously applied or in what ways they can be made most effective differ widely from one period of time to another. Hence now, in the midst of a World Revolution, the instrumentalities of education—their objectives and their methods—need constant reexamination as to what revision of these is desirable or necessary. The chapters of history are being written too full in contemporary events for us to accept precepts, even of the recent past, as our sole guide. On the other hand, we see life at too close range to sense its proportions, except as we check these by available knowledge of causes, influences, and effects of great world transformations of the past. In consequence, it requires a nice sense of proportion on the part of the official College as to what it shall offer in instruction and on the part of the student as to what he shall seek in the curriculum to make the mutual relationship of maximum advantage.

Such reflections suggest discussion of the question which is sometimes raised concerning the extent to which Dartmouth has gone and proposes to go in consideration of student point of view in devising its policies. The validity of the answer we make is contingent upon the degree to which we are justified in believing that through our admission system we enroll a particularly competent group of undergraduates, capable of detached and impersonal evaluation of College policies and College accomplishments. Often, in contemplation of the difficulties of the Admissions Office in attempting to explain to parents or friends why the application of some personable boy is not being accepted, I think of the analogy drawn by Plato. He said that dyers, when they wished to dye wool for making the true sea purple, made their beginning in the most scrupulous care in selection of the white material upon which their dye was to work, for only the most carefully selected material could take the purple hue in full perfection. In the last analysis, it is you men of the undergraduate body who will reveal in the advantage you take of the College opportunity whether selection of the material has been wisely made.

In consideration of what education is and who should define it, there is one contention upon which our most brilliant literati dwelt in the years succeeding the War and which became widely held, the fallacies in which are gradually being revealed. Indictment was made against the spirit and the mind of the older generations on the assumption that they were solely responsible for the adversities of mankind. It was asserted that youth, because of its very nature, was possessed of more altruism and more perspicacity than could be expected to pertain to age. In consequence, demand was made that the reins of guidance in world affairs be placed in the hands of youth. Maturer generations in large degree relinquished these willingly, genuinely hopeful for the success of new generations. Such success is nowhere apparent. Now, after a decade and a half, the world is still bogged in difficulties, and such progress as has been made has been as much due to elder statesmen as to zealous youth. It would appear that some evidence had been adduced that the wine of thought, like other rare wines, is harsh at vintage and needs some aging to acquire either bouquet or potency. Mankind must be classified in some other way than by chronology of birth, if shock troops are to be found to meet difficulties of the present and crises in the future. In such classification, intelligence and wisdom, courage and good will are the indispensable qualities and these are not found exclusively in any age group. Education, for general welfare, must seek always to capitalize the whole experience of mankind as a basis for learning and not simply the experience of a given group, whether classified by race, by station, or by age.

I SPEAK OF these things particularly at this time because, in devising College policies and formulating curriculum patterns, it is essential to have fullest mutual understanding between the continuing official college and the comparatively transitory undergraduate college. It would often be as great an injustice to the men undergraduates are to become to place overmuch weight upon their opinions as undergraduates as it would be a great mistake to ignore them. The state in conformity to desires of its citizenship, the church in relations with its membership, and even industry in collective bargaining with its workers, deal with bodies comparatively permanent and relatively possessed of perspective concerning mutual affairs. The college, in its association with undergraduates, deals with a group in which four years is a complete generation and one in which the membership changes largely from year to year. It is not infrequent at all for the undergraduate mind to reverse itself more than once within a college generation of four years.

These comments are not made critically, but simply for understanding. The facts could not well be otherwise. I have recently been trying, for example, to compare conditions in higher education a century ago with those of today. There are today vastly increased resources and greatly increased richness of curriculum offerings in the American college. There are incomparably more numerous and in many respects more deeply learned faculties offering instruction. There are student bodies far better prepared for absorbing education and I believe, in the large, more comprehending of what education is. Yet in spite of all, so great has been the increase of knowledge needful for understanding the world in which we live and so greatly complicated has our civilization become, that I doubt whether relatively a man graduating from college today can know as much about world affairs and his relationship to these as he could have known about his world a hundred years ago. In so far as this conclusion is justified, so much greater is the need for joint effort between college and student on terms of fullest comprehension of the capabilities of each and of mutual respect.

IN DISCUSSION elsewhere, I have said what I wish to repeat here, that institutionalized education, in concentration upon the present, must early recognize that it deals today with a generation off balance and subconsciously distraught at its lack of equilibrium. The nature of man heretofore has been determined largely by external circumstances far different from anything existent today. Life was only possible by exhausting physical effort; emotionalism was dangerous, except as governed by shrewd calculation, and was rigidly suppressed; purposefulness was maintained by the daily need and the importance of accumulating some economic reserve. Each day required new struggle for existence; insecurity on every hand led to groping for the comfort of belief in an all-wise and all-just arbiter of man's affairs, through whom a balance in man's accounts was inevitable in this world or in some Elysium of the hereafter.

Today, physical effort is little required, in comparison with conditions not long past; emotionalism is restrained by the rationalism of those of scholarly nature but runs riot elsewhere, thus being lacking in those who need it most and overwhelming those least able to use it wisely; economic reserves and creature comforts, even today, prevail in excess of anything known until recent times; and finally, the tempo of life has been so increased and the survival factors have been so multiplied that we are unconscious of existent needs which in the past have been cared for by a religious spirit lacking today.

Meanwhile, the mind of man dwells in a physical body, upon the normal development of which it is dependent; is profoundly influenced by emotional impulses, unduly suppressed among a few but for the many largely released from their formal controls; and suffers loss in its lack of any sense of religion to give it sense of proportion in its relations to the universe. As in the day of Samuel, "The word of the Lord is rare; there is no frequent vision."

Under these conditions man, relieved of the imperative necessity of being objective in his nature, has become largely subjective. Released from most of the immediate obligations to adjust himself to conditions no longer existent in life, he falls naturally into the attitude that it is his privilege that the world be adjusted to him. Rejecting all lessons of time and all experiences of the race, he commits himself to the theory that there is no reality except in affairs of the present and that there is no substance in conclusions derived from any source excepting the inner consciousness of his own intellect. THUS IT has come about quite understandably that the disposition natural to modern youth, except as modified by education and self-discipline, is to be self-centered and acquisitive, to be overconfident in regard to opinions founded on data insufficient to substantiate these, to be oblivious to the indispensability of a sense of relative proportions, and to generalize concerning matters where particularization is requisite for knowledge. Causes are appraised to be all good or all bad; leaders of public thought are adjudged to be wholly admirable or entirely lacking in qualities entitled to respect. These natural characteristics are not to be ignored among those which of necessity must undergo modification in the college course, if men are to graduate with a developed and disciplined sense of responsibility for the general welfare of the human society into which they go. Without such sense, the college relationship will certainly prove to have been vain and may prove to have been harmful.

That great observer and interpreter of modern life and thought, Professor Alfred North Whitehead, has reiterated again and again the thesis which he succinctly stated in Science and the ModernWorld:

"The problem is not how to produce

great men, but how to produce great

societies. The great society will put up thethe men for the occasions." Again, he refers in this connection to "the zest of selfforgetful transcendence belonging to civilization at its height."

To my mind, there can be no question of the changed function of college education in these days. It must focus its attention upon the problem of producing the great society and of undertaking to create in its individual students the zest for self-forgetful transcendence. By as much as society is greater than the individual man, the responsibility of the College is increased far beyond anything which has ever rested upon it before. For meeting this responsibility we need in our collective efforts not so much intellectualism alone as that quality, inclusive of intellectualism, which William James has called "tough-mindedness." Upon the capacity of undergraduates to develop this and upon the capacity of faculty and administration to assist them in such development, future generations will judge the worth of Dartmouth in our time.

If in contemplation of the task any shrink from the challenge or any be appalled by the difficulties, I commend to them one of the statements of Francis Bacon in his essay on Advancement of Learning:

"Another error is an impatience ofdoubt, and haste to assertion without dueand mature suspension of judgment. Forthe two ways of contemplation are not unlike the two ways of action, commonlyspoken of by the ancients: the one plainand smooth in the beginning, and in theend impassable; and the other rough andtroublesome in the entrance, but after awhile fair and even: so it is in contemplation; if a man will begin with certainties,he shall end in doubts; but if he will becontent to begin with doubts, he shall endin certainties."