PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS TO THE ALUMNI
The Remarks of President Hopkins at the Alumni Luncheon
THE PROVINCE of a College officer at this occasion is not primarily to give a definition of educational purpose. It is rather to say a word of greeting and, in this particular year, more definitely than usually, even, to express appreciation of the spirit of alumni participation in the affairs of the College. Inquiry has been made not infrequently in recent months as to whether it was desirable to attempt to carry on the Commencement in its customary form, lest the attendance of alumni be so small as to cast a gloom over the events. On the contrary, we find at the present time that the attendance is not smaller, that members of the reuning classes and many others are assembling in groups as numerous as hitherto. This would be sufficient reason for the spokesman for the College to signify appreciation under any circumstances, as I do now signify it, but there is even more to say than that. The privilege has been extended to me of meeting many of the alumni in groups and many others as individuals. If impressions are to be trusted at all, the statement is justified that interest in the great objectives of the College was never keener, that solicitude has never been shown more definitely, and that loyal support has never been available more liberally.
Moreover, some associated with the college world at large and unacquainted with the deeper significance of the Dartmouth spirit have expressed surprise that the Alumni Council and the Alumni Fund Committee should suppose it to be possible in a year like this to secure for the College any financial support of the sort represented by the Alumni Fund. Yet reports made to me by those sponsoring the Fund are specific that contributions are being made available according to the ability of alumni to make these gifts. In many cases, likewise, it is obvious that members of the alumni body, even to the extent of selfsacrifice and self-deprivation, are desirous of being enrolled among those who, according to their means, have in this difficult year stood by the College. I cannot in any degree express the even deeper feeling of obligation imposed upon the officers of the College by these facts to make Dartmouth worthy of the support the alumni give.
ALL IN ALL, however, I feel my respon. sibility on these occasions to be most definitely to speak to the Senior Class as alumni which they are so soon to become rather than primarily to other alumni gathered here, to many of whom I have already spoken from time to time throughout the year. It is no reflection on the undergraduate mind to say that the College purpose and the College effort only begin to be seen in perspective as men approach the graduation date. It is for this reason, perhaps, that those of us who are resident officers of the College have a feeling of regreat, approaching apprehension even, as each year we see the men about to leave this campus upon whom we have relied and in regard to whose judgments we have come to have respect. It never seems as though the undergraduate body of the College could be as well established, as well poised, and as available for support for vital College policies after a given Senior Class shall have gone out as before. To you of the Class of 1933 I can say quite truly that this sentiment has been so strong in regard to you as to seem a particularly special and individual feeling. Yet the reassurance to us all, the satisfaction that remains for those who love the College, is the fulfillment of promise which annually recurs. In the great procession which has been marching through Dartmouth's halls for more than one hundred and sixty years is the evidence of what shall continue. Classes as yet largely unconscious of the scope of the College responsibilities, and largely unconcerned with the methods by which the College undertakes to meet these responsibilities, will in their turn become solicitous and cooperative. Each year remembrance of what has been contributed by men of former times is stimulated by the new groups which come marching on.
From time to time and in many a different place, I have expressed to the alumni the developing purpose of the College and the aspirations for which it stands. Today, I wish particularly to the Class of 1933 to give a pledge of the faith that is in me. To you, in what is virtually the ceremony of your initiation into the alumni body, I wish to say a few words as to what it seems to me this College effort is all about at Dartmouth.
We cannot escape, if we would, from the fact that this is an age of collectivism and that in many of the activities of life dealings have to be with men in the mass or in large groups rather than as individuals. The implications of these facts cannot be entirely avoided by the colleges nor can the colleges entirely escape from the confusing effects of these implications, when applied to educational policy. Expansion of educational opportunity, even in the realms of higher education, has been extraordinarily rapid in recent years. Institutions have multiplied and student enrollment in institutions of higher education has quintupled within a quarter of a century. Nevertheless, during this period there has been no change in the fundamental fact that, as John Locke said long ago, men's minds differ as definitely as their faces. Educational advantage begins to be lost the moment that it has to be considered in terms too far apart from those of benefit to the individual man.
There is, meanwhile, existent a small group of historic colleges, many of them, like Dartmouth, founded before the establishment of the Nation, which have in greater or lesser degree, according to their respective lights and opportunities, undertaken to hold to a fundamental recognition of this fact of the individual characteristics of each man's mind. These are known as the colleges of liberal arts, and they concern themselves with the general principles of the enrichment of life, to the end that each man's contribution shall be a consequential one to men about him and a satisfying one to him himself. In anticipation of the individual lives of men of the Class, I am not interested either officially or personally in what men ordinarily call success, and I am not interested essentially in whether a man makes his life useful to a great many people or to the associates of his home community. The vital thing is the spirit with which you men live with your neighbors and the fruits of their association with you. The fact that the College strives to minister to you individually becomes an indictment if it leads you simply to a belief that you should be ministered to by all others, without responsibility to them. The man seeking simply his own indulgence or his own satisfactions, regardless of the rights or privileges of others, can never be truly representative of the spirit which has made our colleges great and which has made them as influential as they are in the life of our people.
During the War I was sitting in the home of President Faunce of Brown, when news was brought in of the German longrange shooting of the newly developed "Big Bertha" and of the rather ineffective attack for the time on Paris. In connection with this, President Faunce remarked that there was an educational analogy involved, and he said this was the weakness of method in too much of our higher education at that given time. "We are," he said, "pointing our big guns into the air and shooting at the crowd, hoping that possibly we will hit somebody, whereas what we need in our colleges is a return to sharpshooting, aiming at the individual man." What that sagacious educational leader stated fifteen years ago, I believe is essentially true today.
I USED TO think, and probably I have said, that ignorance was the greatest hazard the world had to meet. As time has gone on, however, and as I have had the opportunity of viewing the effects of education in contemporary years, I have come to believe that perhaps there is as great a hazard to the welfare of mankind in the inadequate use of education as there is even in ignorance. If I could be certain that each one of you men of the Class of 1933 or even that a majority of you would keep alive within your hearts the desire to know and within your minds the zeal for learning, I should feel completely reassured, where under any circumstances I insist upon having assurance. I have, however, observed among presumably intelligent men, who have had all of the opportunities of education, influences which seem to me disastrous to all that makes for progress. There is in some the inertia of mind which refuses to consider new ideas; there is in others a narrowness of mind which finds comprehensive knowledge of the world difficult and therefore in a defensive attitude shuts itself up in a specialized interest in life, without concern for what goes on without the boundaries of this; and third, there is the type of mind which commits itself with such vehemence to special causes that it creates a habit of false emphasis in thought and judges its respective concerns as of more consequence than all other phases of life and the establishment of its cause as justifiable, no matter how false the propaganda necessary for its achievement.
The problem of avoiding these fallacies is not a simple one for the individual man; as a matter of fact, the fundamental problems of education cannot be largely simplified under any circumstances. However, if the service of Dartmouth to you men of 1933 has been such that you go out into the world determined to preserve a spirit of open-mindedness, to consider the possible values of new ideas; or if you recognize the fact of the community of life as a whole and that one specialized interest is important only in its relationship to another; or if you have some disposition to preserve the habit of mind which will undertake to maintain a sense of proportion and to place first things first;—if these be your characteristics, in you the College purpose will find interpreters, justifying beyond measure all of the effort of the College in your time to offer you advantage and justifying beyond cavil the vast expenditure of human solicitude and careers and material wealth which for a century and a half have been assembling for your advantage.
PHILLIPS BROOKS years ago said in Westminister Abbey that the challenge of nation to nation and of age to age had always been, "Show us your man." We meet today in provincial spirit and quite acknowledgedly for the conservation of the spirit of loyalty which has been bred within us upon this plain, among these halls, and under auspices to which the name of Dartmouth has been attached. To many of you men of 1933 the College designation is going to mean more from year to year, as time goes on, than it has ever meant in the past. In some the consecration of devoted loyalty and in others the pride of association are going to produce the desire that the name of Dartmouth shall be significant even beyond anything that it has been before and to a degree unsurpassed by any other college of like kind. The answers to whether these things shall be or not will lie in the answer which can be made to the challenge, "Show us your man." In entire genuineness and in spirit of highest confidence, I say to you men of 1933 that in you and through you Dartmouth is prepared to meet this challenge.
Gibran's "Prophet," about to go out from the people among whom he had lived, said, "You have sung to me in my aloneness, and I of your longings have built a tower in the sky." Dartmouth, within the limits of human fallibility and with the restrictions upon her of inability to know every man as he should be known, has, nevertheless, never been unconscious of the need of the song which the College should sing to each man in his aloneness. With what success this has been sung or how clearly the song has been heard or how much of it has been understood, only the future can tell. Perhaps, as you return at the end of fifty years, as has this class whose greeting you have heard today, the answer will be in the record of how completely from Dartmouth's longings you have built your tower in the sky.
