The Undergraduate Chair

Another June Arrives, Bringing Seniors the Opportunity as Alumni to Gain New Perspective on College

With this issue Richard E. Glendinning'4O of Ridgefeld, Conn., assumes occupancy of The Undergraduate Chair. Thenew undergraduate editor of the MAGAZINE is editorial chairman of The Dartmouth and is a member of Sigma AlphaEpsilon fraternity. He prepared for Dartmouth at the Silver Bay School, LakeGeorge, N. Y., and at the Northwood.School, Lake Placid, N. Y. Glendinningsucceeds Ralph N. Hill '39 of Burlington,Vt., who ended his undergraduate editorship with the May issue.

A NOTHER June, another graduation service and another group of seniors putting on long black gowns, walking about the campus with parents, smoking clay pipes in the College Park, packing suitcases and leaving Dartmouth.

Last September we overheard two freshmen talking on the steps of the Administration Building just after they had registered. One was informing the other that he had been in Hanover only three days and he felt that he knew the place already. The second nodded his head as much as to say that he also was fully acquainted with Dartmouth and all that went with it. But we know a senior, one of the men who will step up and get his diploma when his name is called, a man who is highly respected on the campus. Last week he said that after four years at Dartmouth he could not truthfully say that he knew the College.

The freshman knew where Dartmouth Hall was; he could tell three out of four of the houses on fraternity row and he knew his way round in the gym. The senior could tell all those too, but his Dartmouth represents something more than a physical plant—it involves a mental process as well, a process which no one can learn in three days nor understand in four years.

Dartmouth to the senior has something to do with coming to college as a freshman with set ideas and having them shaken, having them broken down and having set up in their places ideas which don't congeal, which conflict, which agree in part, which disagree in whole. It has something to do with listening to the organized singing of the glee club on the steps of Dartmouth Hall and going back to the fraternity house to sing the same songs a bit off key, or watching the football team play together as a body and then getting together a touch football game in the center of the campus with every man for himselfDartmouth has something to do with organization and disorganization, working with the groups, and acting as an individual.

It implies sun baths behind the dorm and skiing on the golf course—eating in Commons and a meal ticket downtownthree classes on Mondays, two on Tuesdays and a ten-day Easter vacation—hitching down to White River on Friday nights and a trip to Smith for the Spring Dance—borrowing a clean white shirt from the roommate and lending him a pair of socksgiving a friend a vote for Green Key and picking out the best men for Palaeopitus.

The freshman can't see it and the senior is much too close to it to understand it, and he won't be able to understand until he has been out five, ten, fifteen years, and can look back on college with an element of perspective which may tie together the stray ends, just as stepping back a few steps to look at a painting may unify the clashing colors and garbled patterns. Not until the senior has made the step backward can he make any order out of the chaos which today he cannot understand.

ABOUT CAMPUS IN THE PAST MONTH

The past month has been one of conferences and meetings for Dartmouth, beginning with the Peace Week and climaxed by the Tri-College Conference on "Making Democracy Work." Seldom has Hanover seen as many outstanding educators and figures in the public service in a space of two days as during the latter meeting. If Democracy ever had an opportunity to speak its piece, to listen to conflicting theories, and to evaluate all sides, which is the very essence of Democracy, it had that chance when such personages as Granville Hicks, Roger Baldwin, Nels Anderson, Lewis Mumford, Alexander Meiklejohn, William Cowley, and Elinore Herrick, gathered about round tables to act as consultants for the four discussion groups: "Public vs. Private Enterprise in a Democratic Society," "Are Our Civil Liberties Threatened?", "The College in a Democratic Society," and "Federal-State-Local Relations in Administration of Old Age and Unemployment Relief."

Mrs. Herrick set the stage for the discussions when, in reference to her own work as Regional Director of the National Labor Relations Board, she said, "You can't legislate the will to agree into any man or organization—you can't make him agree if his mind is made up not to give an inch. Agreement can only come through long, slow, undramatic processes of education and experience." Her conviction was borne out during the conference, for the only tie the consultants had in common was experience in their own fields and a will to sit down with others who disagree in an effort to reach an agreement.

The agreement reached was summarized in the editorial columns of The Dartmouth following the conference: "One day after the tri-college conference, Dartmouth who were a part of it have experienced an intellectual reawakening, a mental washing, and a realization of their own responsibility to the democracy they are attempting to attain. Realistic, hard, exciting, and of tremendous importance to undergraduate thinking and action, the tri-college conference was a true expression of Dartmouth's liberal policy—for many of us, the realization, not only that democracy is not working but that through the actions based on liberal education, it can."

Second in importance to the tri-college conference was the week of peace meetings which began on the 17th of April and ran through to the 20th—a week which reached its climax with a debate between Prof. Lewis I). Stilwell, of the Department of History, and H. Wentworth Eldredge, instructor in Sociology, the former defending Isolation and the latter Collective Security. But the meeting was not so unique for its program as it was for its result.

On May 5, Professor Stilwell appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in Washington to testify on neutrality conditions and the outlook for neutrality legislation, through the invitations of Senator Pittman of Nevada and Senator Bridges of New Hampshire. Professor Stilwell's testimony before the committee was essentially the same as that which he told over 300 students and faculty in Dartmouth Hall a few weeks earlier: public opinion in America is rapidly swinging over to the side of the theory of isolation.

STUDENT POLL BEING TAKEN

A second result of the peace week was the optimistically drawn up poll of Chan Thomas '42 which is idealistically intended to reach every college in the United States in an attempt to determine undergraduate opinion on neutrality, attitudes toward war, and methods of legislation forbidding the lending of support to all warring nations. That the peace meetings did not collapse from exhaustion, to remain that way until pulled out of moth balls next year, is an indication that at least a few Dartmouth men are not satisfied to think of peace for but a few days out of the year. However, it is probable that Thomas' poll, which, as originally conceived, was to contact 800,000 students, the largest collegiate poll ever formulated, will merely prove the ineffectiveness of such polls in more places at the same time than any other has done to date.

The youth of today, and of any other day, is not interested in such polls—quite logically it wonders what effects its opinion will have on legislation when it knows that undergraduate pressure groups, which burst across the horizon and fizzle out as quickly as they appeared, have never been as effective as the continued force of lobbying pressure blocks which make their headquarters in the nation's capital. If Chan Thomas' poll meets with the same treatment as other similar polls which we have seen, it will join book advertisements and yesterday's paper in the nearest waste basket.

Palaeopitus has been given the broadespower of student government any undergraduate body at Dartmouth has ever been granted, in the four-point program approved by President Hopkins on May 10. The Dartmouth has continually campaigned for such increased representation for the student body in administrative affairs. The result has been a plan which will give the senior governing body the opportunity to meet semi-monthly with five administrative committees of the college. It will appoint a member who will be in close contact with each administrative committee; it will aid alumni in interviewing prospective freshmen, and it will assume control over the constitutions of all campus organizations.

The campus agrees with the spirit of the plan, that of increased student representation in defining and carrying through policies, but it is opposed to the interference of Palaeopitus in the administration of the organizations, through the power that the senior group will have over constitutions. Opposition is particularly strong within the organizations themselves, for they feel that the governing body is not qualified to direct activities in which they have neither personal interest, nor actual experience, in the inner workings of the organizations. Junto would hardly care to have its activities under the thumb of Palaeopitus, and this is equally true of the Players, or The Dartmouth, or the Glee Club, or any other that you care to mention. None would object to Palaeopitus' serving in a purely advisory capacity and it is this power they would like to see substituted for the present rigid control which Palaeopitus has the right to exercise.

We have been told that one of the duties of the editors of The Undergraduate Chair is to reflect or interpret student opinion. As we take over our new post, we realize more fully than ever that the very element which makes Dartmouth what it is, a large body made up of many smaller groups, all expressing their own opinions, will make our duty a difficult one. We can only speak for ourselves and trust that it re-echoes the feeling of the greatest number of Dartmouth undergraduates. RICHARD E. GLENDINNING '40.

MILESTONES

1940 PALAEOPITUS: Richard F. Babcock, Woodstock, 111.; Thomas W. Braden, Dubuque, la.; Elmer T. Browne, Shaker Heights, Ohio; Eben H. Cockley, Shaker Heights, Ohio; John U. Crandell, Bronxville, N. Y.; David W. Davenport, Cleveland, Ohio; Don E. Fox, Beverly Hills, Calif.; Robert A. Hale, Washington, D. C.; Roy R. Merchant, West Newton, Mass.; C. Whitney Miller, Seattle, Wash.; John D. O'Shea, Laconia, N. H.; Donald G. Rainie, Concord, N. H.; Scott A. Rogers, Shaker Heights, Ohio; John F. Rourke Jr., West Roxbury, Mass.; Danforth W. Toan, Leonia, N. J.

BARGE GOLD MEDAL FOR ORATORY: William A. Martin '39, Evanston, 111.

CLASS OF 1866 ORATORICAL PRIZE: C. Page Smith '4o, Ruxton, Md.

INTERDORMITORY COUNCIL: President, John C. Horner '41, Lafayette, Ind.; Secretary, John F. O'Brien '40, Boston, Mass.

BROOKS CUP FOR DEBATING: Louis F. Oberdorfer '39, Birmingham, Ala.

LOCKWOOD DEBATING PRIZE: Jack J. Preiss '40, Hackensack, N. J.

1940 AEGIS: Editor-in-Chief, Richard F. Babcock, Woodstock, 111.; Business Manager, Chester S. Brett, Jr., Brookline, Mass.; Managing Editor, William S. Duncan, Cleveland, Ohio; Advertising Manager, Raymond S. Kan tor, Rutland, Vt.; Associate Editor, Cecil W. Moore, Bayside, N. Y.

MANDEL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE PRIZES: First—Divided between Whitney Cushing '39, Newtonville, Mass., and Richard L. Hobbs '39, Maiden, Mass.; Second—Duncan L. Bassett '4O, Shaker Heights, Ohio.

1941 GREEN KEY: President, Peter M. Keir, Hanover; Vice President, Louis A. Young Jr., Narberth, Pa.; Recording Secretary, Donald E. Norton, Minneapolis, Minn.; Treasurer, Abbott C. Combes, Elmhurst, N. Y.; Corresponding Secretary, Morton McGinley, Baltimore, Md.; Chairman of Assignments, Lawrence E. Thompson, San Marino, Calif.

Members—Sorren R. Arneson, Scarsdale, N. Y.; Douglas G. Atwood, Winsted, Conn.; Donald F. Blount, Providence, R. I.; John R. Bowers, Detroit, Mich.; Gustave T. Broberg Jr., Torrington, Conn.; Frederic S. Cluthe, West Harwich, Mass.; Sanford R. Courter, Cincinnati, Ohio; James G. Curtis, Elmhurst, N. Y.; John V. Delander, Medford, Mass.; Fred L. Eaton, Hinsdale, 111.; Vincent R. Else, Minneapolis, Minn.; Robert V. O. Evans, Cleveland, Ohio; Bruce Friedlich, New York City; Henry Gunst Jr., Richmond, Va.; Stacy H. Hill, Cincinnati, Ohio; Peter Jacobsen Jr., Lake Lillian, Minn.; John W. Kelley, Minneapolis, Minn.; George A. Ladd, Burlington, Vt.; Roscoe V. Lewis, Roslyn, N. Y.; Edward N. Marlette, Buffalo, N. Y.; Richard B. McCornack, Chicago, 111.; Osborne Mills, Cleveland Heights, Ohio; Robert W. Nissen, Glen Ellyn, 111.; Thomas E. Oakes, Minneapolis, Minn.; John I. Orr, Mt. Lebanon, Pa.; Robert C. Rainie, Concord, N. H.; Edward J. Rasmussen, Scarsdale, N. Y.; Charles C. Reed, Milwaukee, Wis.; Maynard H. Riley, Winnetka, 111.; Peter F. Scott, Canajoharie, N. Y.; Ira Skutch Jr., New York City; Irving F. Smith, Crafton, Pa.; Richard J. Spillane, Bloomfield, Conn.; Arthur A. Stern, New York City.

1940 INTERFRATERNITY COUNCIL: President, David W. Davenport, Cleveland, Ohio; Vice President, James D. Tredup, Chicago, 111.; Secretary, Kenneth C. Steele, Springfield, Mass.; Treasurer, John F. Willson, St. Albans, Vt.

COUNCIL ON STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS: Executive Assistant to the Graduate Manager, Robert T. Wetzler '4O, Hollis, N. Y.; Assistant Executive Assistant to the Graduate Manager, George A. Ladd '41, Burlington, Vt.; Assistant Business^Manager of the Players, Peter F. Scott '41, Canajoharie, N. Y.; Assistant Publicity Manager of the Players, F. Victor Schneider '41, Brooklyn, N. Y.; Assistant Business Manager of the Glee Club, Frederic S. Cluthe '41, West Harwich, Mass.; Assistant Manager of the Band, William B. Hammond '41, Springfield, Mass.

President Hopkins, honorary referee at thetrack meet May 13, and Sumner B. Emerson '17, chairman of this year's AlumniFund campaign.

PAUL SAMPLE '20, ARTIST IN RESIDENCE, SHOWN (LEFT) INSTRUCTING STUDENTS IN ONE OF HIS INFORMAL, EXTRA-CURRICULAR ART CLASSES. AT RIGHT, AN UNDERGRADUATE ARTIST SKETCHES A STUDENT MODEL AT THE TUESDAY NIGHT GATHERING IN CARPENTER HALL.

OFFICIALS OF THE HOLY CROSS-DARTMOUTH TRACK MEET LAST MONTH The custodian of prizes at left is Prof. Edmund H. Booth '18 of the department of English; the official scorer of the meet, right, is Max A. Norton '19, bursar of the College andpresident of the board of trustees of the Hitchcock Memorial Hospital.