Gradus Ad Parnassum
The North Country Fair has come andgone. It was a great success socially ingathering some thousands of undergraduates, farmers, and folks from Lebanon,Hanover, and White River all togetherunder the ample roof of the gym. It was apleasant event financially in that the Hitchcock Hospital is facing a much smaller deficit for the year's operations as a result ofthe entire proceeds of the Fair being turnedover to it. There is some apprehension onthe part of the committee that staged theFair April 13, headed by Mrs. Hopkins,that it will be called on to do it again. Thewhole thing is mentioned here on accountof this angle. This may become an AnnualEvent. Alumni may be pee-rading back toHanover in the future to take in the NorthCountry Fair, in addition to coming backto see the Orescoes and attend reunions.("Orescoes" was coined by Johnny Bill,young son of Dean Bill.)
The Fair this first year was built on apublicity and physical background of"Hollywood" motif. Walter Wanger 'l5 didhis best to engage the services of a moviestar for the occasion. That this finally fellthrough when Katherine Hepburn had tochange her plans and give up the trip toHanover for the Fair was just as well fromone point of view. There was hardly standing rootn in any part of the gym afternoonor evening of the big day. If Miss Hepburnhad been there the gym wouldn't havebeen crowded, it would have been mobbed.
Students at Union College recently offered the following set of questions to their faculty through the Concordiensis, the undergraduate publication:
Do you find your greatest i7iterest inyour students and in intellectual pursuits?
Do you seek to enlighten your students,rather than to make them recite fundamentals?
Do you try to introduce them to life andthought, not coach them to pass examinations?
Do you put yourself forward as a dispenser of truth, not as an ingratiatingvaudeville actor?
Do you give the student all you have ofscholarship, wisdom and understanding,despite their supposed immunity to such?
Do you stimulate the mind of the studentto suggest ideas and to correlate the looseends of information?
Are you enthusiastic, alive, free from alldull pedantry and dogma?
Are you striving to be a personal friendof the student, a guide, and an inspiration?
If it were possible for any one instructor to answer Yes to all of the foregoing statements, it would probably be the dawn of the Utopian day in college education. Likewise, in order to match this series, if the students were asked "Do intellectual interests come first in your mind?" and the answer Yes was given, then it would be time to look for Millenium.
