THE COLLEGE OF THE FREE MAN
NEWSPAPER COMMENT and letters concerning the leading editorial in the recent Undergraduate Number of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE have expressed some surprise at the inclusion therein of some of the statements made in the editorial. Mr. Charles B. Strauss '34, editor of the Steeplejack, who wrote the editorial concluded it in this fashion: "For until an international communal order is achieved, the worth of the college will be tested by the number of radicals it contributes to society."
To interpret this, or the sentiments of any one of the other student writers of editorials in this number as magazine policy, is of course absurd. Whatever policy there may be is governed by the attitude of the alumni and College organization toward matters affecting the life and growth of the College, and the lives and interests of the alumni themselves. On the whole the editors endeavor to represent this attitude, though in cases where the necessity might arise, the board feels itself empowered to take quick action, such action to be based upon the several judgments of its members, for the good of the College or the alumni.
However, when the MAGAZINE throws open its columns to students, as it does each year, no restrictions are laid upon the contributors except this one, which is really more an implication than a command, that all expressions of opinion shall be sincere and honest, aimed at no one person in hostile fashion, well thought out, and sufficiently considered. In following such a policy we are but following the precepts of every president of Dartmouth College, beginning with Wheelock himself who prefaced his Narratives with two Biblical quotations upholding the position of the "liberal" man.
The liberal, in the older sense of the word, is a free man. He is neither slave, serf, servant, nor flunkey. And as Dartmouth has maintained, the expression of the free mind is one of the worth while things, and sometimes, to the vexation of its friends and sons (though not to all), it circulates, as in the case of the student editorial, sentiments which even appear hostile to a more settled generation. Yet there is nothing more harmful in the world than honest thought stifled, and the liberal college has as one of its functions the stimulation as well as the expression of thought in the mind of the free man.
