SURPRISE! SURPRISE!

Way ahead of the Queen in campus attention, however, was the Duchess of Dartmouth. This young lady, Miss Deborah Holmes of Waban, Mass., and Smith College, was the winner of The Dartmouth's contest for the best-written letter from a student at a girl's college on the subject of "why I Wish To Attend the Dartmouth Carnival ; the prize being one free Dartmouth Carnival, of all things. The lucky Boston debutante (Dartmouth contest-winners are always the real McCoy) also won William N. ("Bill") Hartman, popular senior bon vivant, as her week-end escort.

The entire idea, conceived in the spirit of good, clean fun and dividend-paying publicity, was handled with all the delicacy and finesse of an Atlantic City Bathing-Beauty Contest. After Nelson K. Billings (haha) and the Duchess, one wonders what those clever journalistic zanies will panic the campus with next.

But all surprises of the week-end—including the spectacle of a winter sports championship, usually considered in the bag, salvaged for Dartmouth only by some magnificent ski-jumping—pale to insignificance in comparison with the success of student Carnival-regulation.

We hold this phenomenon to be one of the most important steps in Dartmouth social history. Its background is decidedly interesting: Mr. Hopkins came to the opinion that, if the undergraduates so desired, it would be a good idea to allow them responsibility for gentlemanly control of their fraternity parties during Carnival. The Interfraternity Council voted assent; Palaeopitus presented a plan of regulation; Mr. Hopkins approved it; the several houses O.R.'d it—and the parties were run, under nominal Palaeopitus supervision, in as orderly a fashion as the campus has witnessed in a long, long time.

The plan of course did not work out perfectly—but its comparative success leads one to a startling conclusion: either the Dartmouth student is learning how to hold his liquor, or else—abandoning this is hopeless—he is coming to think that perhaps this business of acting like a gentleman is not necessarily such a sissy idea. In any event, we add somewhat defiantly, the Dartmouth student is growing up. We consider this move of President Hopkins the first step in the gradual entrusting of more and more responsibility to the hands of a maturing undergraduate body.