"NEW SPIRIT"
This "maturing undergraduate body" is largely a myth, of course. Robinson Hall has spluttered and fumed about this since September, but there has been little real change thereby in the boys in Middle Mass. Much more potent factors, however, have been at work during the same period, and a process of change—slight as it may be—is occurring on the campus.
These factors are, briefly, economic events in this country and politico-economics battles in Europe and the Far East. The impact of New York Times and Herald-Tribune headlines day after day, especially during the last few months, have started the boys thinking. This strange manifestation is, of course, most marked in the Senior class, in the men who are going out to live the news in a little while.
Perhaps we are overstating the case, but we think that the above factors were what took the wind out of the student-editorial sails from November on. A lot of the boys "with stuff on the ball" came back in September tremendously upset about the imminence of a rah-rahnaissance at Dartmouth, about freshman rules, about football. From this Steeplejack was born, and even The Dartmouth was sucked in to worrying about something.
And bit by bit—that energy has been dissipated. The "crazy intellectuals" and a good many of their fellow-students have come around to seeing that the College is none too important by itself; that it is the national structure, and not just an outgrowth of it, that is truly significant.
In the long run, it is merely a question of perspective. Faced with tacts like the PWA and CWA running out of money by May, or Japan breaking its neck to get ready for war within a year, the "student-thinkers" are deciding that examination-exemptions and Nugget price-revision are rather of secondary interest. This, then, is a "New Spirit" with some meaning.
Even if this is all purely hypothetical, we can still point to one inevitable result of what has been going on in the Outside World. An end is coming to Dartmouth's long narcissism. The boys are starting to look around, although they may not as yet understand what they are seeing.
