Publications Decision by Trustees

PEACE SETTLED upon the troubled publications front when the Board of Trustees of the College, meeting for its annual fall session on October 26, voted to refer the controversial points of the Publications Report to a committee made up of an equal number of representatives from the administration and from the publications and headed by an impartial chairman. President Hopkins named Robert C. Strong '24, dean of freshmen and director of admissions, as the administrative representative, and the publications named O'Brien Boldt '39, editor-in-chief of TheDartmouth, as their delegate. Up to the present time Dean Strong and Mr. Boldt have made no announcement of their se- lection of a third committee member to serve as chairman.

Before Trustee action was taken on the Report, President Hopkins presented to the Board a statement of the background and present status of the publications question. His important statement of the administration attitude is herewith printed in full:

AT THE MEETING of the Board of Trustees .on June 16, 1938, it was: VOTED that the Report of the Committee on Student Publications be accepted and that the Trustees express their thanks to the Committee for its work and that the Report be laid on the table for consideration at the fall meeting.

Before the Report is taken from the table for consideration of the Board a statement is in order as a matter of record concerning background of the question in its present status. The auspices under which the Report was undertaken were not such as they have been assumed to be by some nor were the purposes at all those which have been ascribed by various persons at various times to the Committee, the administration, or the Trustees.

In the spring of 1935 discussions which had been in process for several years in the faculty Committee on Student Organizations came to a head and it was seriously discussed whether or not the faculty Committee on Student Organizations ought to take cognizance of the dissatisfaction being expressed from time to time in portions of the undergraduate body, in faculty groups, and in alumni circles, at the lack of responsibility assumed by the College in regard to its undergraduate publications. This dissatisfaction arising from time to time took various forms, such as desire on the part of some of the publications for the College to straighten out internal matters of organization which had fallen into confusion, or for the College to assume sponsorship in regard to financial conditions, or for the College to safeguard monopoly, or for the College to interfere against what from time to time was claimed by individuals to be favoritism or political chicanery in certain of the elections as opposed to merit. Meanwhile, of course, as always there had been question raised in various quarters among parents, alumni, schools into which the publications went, and even the outside public, in regard to the periodical violations of proprieties or the not infrequent obliviousness to standards of good taste which distinguished one or another of the publications. There was likewise constant reiteration of charges that from time to time in one or another of the publications the financial conditions were not such as could be approved by an impartial audit or such as offered to various members of the board returns commensurate with the contributions of time and thought they had been called upon to make.

As a result of the consideration given to these matters by the faculty Committee on Student Organizations, and in consequence of the fact that it seemed a more complicated and difficult task than could be undertaken by any existent organization to assemble the data upon which conclusions should be based, it devolved upon the President as an administrative responsibility to arrange for the assembling of the necessary information and drawing conclusions from this as to what steps if any should be taken for bringing the publications into such relationship with the College as was required of all other organizations capitalizing the College prestige or utilizing the College name.

In consequence of my conviction that any attempt on the part of the administration or on the part of the Board of Trustees to assemble these data would be misinterpreted by interested parties and misconstrued by the College constituency as a whole, I sought approval from the Board of Trustees at its meeting on June 10, 1937 for the appointment of a special committee to undertake this task. The Trustees after discussion of the matter adopted the following resolution:

"VOTED that a Committee on Student Publications be appointed by the President. It shall be the duty of this Committee to examine and report upon conditions under which student publications utilizing the College name or depending for support upon the College constituency are managed, what are their expenditures and by whom these are authorized, what are their profits, and by whom and to whom are these distributed, and upon such other matters as may insure to the College stability and responsibility in conduct of these enterprises."

In order that there should be no question in regard to the knowledge of subjects which it was discussing on the part of members of the Committee, and in order further that there should be no question in regard to the understanding of the modern college on the part of those appointed to this group, I invited to membership on the Committee an outstandingly capable group of former editors and business managers of the publications, mainly from The Dartmouth, together with one member of the faculty Committee on Student Organizations. With the exception of the faculty representative, and of the Chairman of the Committee, who graduated in the class of 1932, there was no member of the Committee whose active participation in work on the publications had been earlier than the class of 1930. The members of this Committee spent much time in many sessions in consideration of the problems submitted to it, painstakingly sought all possible data, considered and discussed all possible conditions, and finally with scrupulous care rendered a report embodying its conclusions.

PROPRIETORSHIP FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION

The fundamental question involved is the question of wherein should lie the proprietorship of the respective organizations. Cliches in regard to the freedom of the press or analogies drawn on the basis of resemblances to outside publications seem to me to be singularly lacking in understanding of the fundamental fact that editorships on college publications constitute special privileges, the profitable subsidies of which are made possible by the administrative protection of the monopolies by which they benefit. Several times, for instance, within the last two decades, desires have been expressed and in one case organization was started to establish a daily at the College in competition with The Dartmouth in the conviction that a better paper at a less price could be published at a reasonable profit. In each case the administration has protected The Dartmouth against the invasion of its field. So far as the question of censorship is concerned, if the College was disposed to exercise a censorship it would not have to accomplish this by indirection. I will not undertake answer to the implication on the part of The Dartmouth that the Committee's recommendation somehow has been engineered by the Administration to establish an officer to take action which the Administration lacks courage to take. I will say, however, that the complete immunity from administrative censorship or control which The Dartmouth has enjoyed in recent decades was not conferred upon it as a result of any administrative fear of anything except that the College should not conform to the most meticulous definition of what constitutes a liberal college. There has been no change in this solicitude. The whole object of seeking authority from the Board of Trustees for the appointment of a committee, the membership of this Committee is constituted, and the conclusions presented by the Committee, have been to establish a basis wherein the College would be assured of responsible management and editorship of College publications and wherein the College could assume that this representation of its interests would be placed in the hands of men intelligent in regard to educational functions and educational opportunities rather than, as is possible at any time under present conditions, that editorship shall be placed in the hands of those more interested in exploitation of the opportunities of The Dartmouth than in rendering real service in the cause of education for which the College exists.

Among those who have constituted themselves as critics of the Report, and particularly in the editorials of The Dartmouth, there has been reiterated reference to the conditions of the century of life of TheDartmouth to which the suggestion of any oversight or supervision is antagonistic. It is only within comparatively recent years that there has been contention that either right existed or privilege should be extended to editors of the publications to revolve in an orbit entirely separate from the orbit of College interest. Much has been made of the stock ownership and of the right of the editors to appropriate this for themselves, but up to twenty-five years ago there was no incorporation of TheDartmouth and no self-appropriated stock holdings. No suspicion existed in the minds of any one connected with a college publication that it was not a child of the College and responsible to the College rather than a self-perpetuated body, free to follow its own devices and to develop its own policies regardless of any existent opinion among undergraduates, alumni, administration, or Trustees. It would seem that if there was merit in the long drawn out controversy of fifty years ago that the Board of Trustees could not in accordance with the best interests of the College be continued as a self-perpetuating Board certainly there is valid argument that the editorial board of The Dartmouth should not be exclusively self-perpetuating whether one considers it the function of The Dartmouth to express student opinion or to lead student thought.

QUESTION ABILITY TO SELECT SUCCESSORS

At other points in the College organization election to an important undergraduate office has to be from a group passed upon as eligible and declared to be capable and worthy by some overseeing body. It is perfectly possible, at least, under the present procedures of election to editorships in undergraduate publications, that a man may be elected to one of these positions who is neither. It is a peculiarly difficult role that the undergraduate editor is called upon to assume. In the protection of that composite factor of college life which we call its spirit and in the circumstances which make existence of the periodicals possible the College is entitled to assurance that these shall be conducted in conformity with major interests of the College rather than as an agency for exploitation by individuals of the privileges which the College offers. It is conceivable under present conditions that a man with a gift of handling words might attain the editorial direction of any one of the College pub- lications even if he were largely deficient in general knowledge of the purposes of education or of the objectives of the College, or if in personal habit and attitudes he were unrepresentative of any of the ideals for which the College stands. There is a phrase in Mallett's "History of Oxford" to the effect that for century after century Oxford has offered her treasures ungrudgingly to those who seek them and her spirit to those who understand. It is at this point where I differ most strongly with those who argue that the little group which constitutes any one of the editorial boards should be encouraged to feel that they are operating completely without obligation of responsibility to any one excepting themselves. It is the possibility of careless and uninformed handling of College issues which vitally affect the spirit of the College that seems to me to demand that a responsibility exist to somebody outside of themselves.

The Committee on Student Publications with the experience of years of editorial work on publications behind it felt that its specific recommendations best represented practical immunity from official censorship, together with the requirement that some sense of responsibility equivalent to the privileges conferred upon them be accepted by the respective managements of College publications. Neither the members of the Committee, however, nor members of the administration are irrevocably committed to anything more than the conviction that responsibility of some sort should be established and maintained. The one point to be determined is wherein lies the proprietorship of the respective College publications. It is, in my belief, desirable that there be a proprietorship somewhere outside of any one of these annually elected editorial boards to which the board should report and to which it should be accountable. Whether, however, this should be in a trustee such as is suggested by the Committee, or in a faculty group, or in an undergraduate organization, or in the Alumni Council, or in the Board of Trustees of the College, or possibly in a composite group from part or from all of these, neither the members of the Committee nor I are greatly concerned. It seems to me that the fundamental fact of responsibility cannot be established except on the basis of recognition of the proprietorship outside of the rapidly changing group of undergraduate editors who no sooner become accustomed to the demands of their work than they a few months later are called upon to lay it down.

The Report of the Committee has been accepted and there is no difference of opinion in regard to any matters excepting this question of proprietorship and what should be the rights and duties of the proprietor. I would suggest that the Trustees directly or through delegated power to the President appoint a representative or representatives to meet with a like number of representatives agreed upon by the publications who, in turn, shall name an impartial chairman. To these I would delegate the whole controversy with assurances that such decision as might be reached would be accepted by the Board supplementary to its acceptance of the Report of the Committee at all other points. The matter is not one which demands haste and it is possible that something more satisfactory to all parties concerned can be devised after the muddied waters of the present discussion have been allowed to clear somewhat and after the problem can be accepted as one in which we all have a common interest.