Life of a Class Agent

Being a Not Too Serious Discussion of a Martyr's Cause, or How to Become a Sainted Maniac in One Easy Lesson

No MORE DIRECT path to (a) mild insanity and (b) Dartmouth's eternal sainthood exists than the weary road of the class agent for the Alumni Fund. While the process of wheedling, exhorting, badgering and propagandizing one's classmates until they cough up handsomely and in large numbers, leads inevitably to several forms of nervous disorganization, the reward (and sole compensation) consists of informal canonization in the College's hallowed host of benefactors.

Reasons for the latter effect are selfevident. Class agents are the tireless workers of the Alumni Fund, beehive, expending their reserves of energy and patience in the honey gathering, amazingly tolerant of the myriad drones, and propelling themselves with a sort of supernatural strength until the drive closes with a bang and a sigh. The beehive analogy would be all right except that real bees curl up and die after all this rushing around (?), while the class agents earn no such blessed release, though the Lord only knows why they don't.

Reasons for the former, or psychiatric, effects of this work are several and various, though none the less starkly real. The nervous irritations of a campaign, the concoction of artful dodges to beat somebody else's artful dodges, the suppression of one's individuality in making endless appeals to "Dear Joe" when the animal urge is to call him an ordinary you-know- what and be done with it, and the personal responsibility for an end result which hangs essentially upon the whims, fancies, digestive disturbances and grocery bills of a few hundred other classmates—all this conspires to produce a peculiar neuroticism which has come to be recognized as the class agent's own industrial disease.

Let us briefly examine the agent. Let us dissect him, analyze him, appraise him, and peer into his innermost psyche.

Before his initiation into the first campaign, he is usually quite a normal person --lives in Middle Fayer, plays ball, parts his hair on the left, intends to marry, and was born in New Rochelle. He is without doubt a good fellow, a leader in the class, and knows most of his classmates by their first, nick and last names. He is as much without disturbing mental complexes as you are. Probably his comforting normality would survive the post-graduate strain of these ominous times as well as the next one, except for the fact that he has beenelected class agent for the class of umptyump. An early conference with those who administer the Fund portends something of what is to befall, but full comprehension of it dawns upon him early the following spring. He has a rendezvous with chaos.

To come to the point, and it's about time we did, it is the agent's job to secure as many and as large contributions to the Alumni Fund as possible from his class each year. Any agent reading this concise statement of duties will be devastated by its blithe generality, and no one blames him. The work, when thoroughly done (and there's always the next year) is a monument of sacrificed time, energy and patience, and if it doesn't subvert a man's conception of human nature, it should.

Our agent is forthwith provided with a large manual, a slough of index cards, lists, statistics, letterheads and miscellaneous paraphernalia, given a rhetorical pat on the back from Hanover, and exhorted by everybody to "make this the biggest year ever." Whereupon, for all his cold feet, he enters the fray resolutely and hopefully. If it is his first year, he may proceed for a while on the naive theory that because all Dartmouth men love their college, they will be pleased to give evidence of said love via all feasible avenues of action. The avenue he will open to them is that of financial support; ergo, they will contribute. Just like that. The illusion of simplicity is promptly dispelled, however, when the agent opens fire.

When nothing happens after the initial blast, the agent is awakened to the rude truth: collecting money is tough stuff, and requires the astute employment of every guileful device, wily trick and advertising jjovelty in the bag. Years of alumni funding have produced tactical brainchildren of agents which are marvelous to contemplate. That agent was no slouch in determining essential human interests who, in a moment of inspiration, conceived the idea of mailing scented letters oil pink paper from Lebanon, N. H., with the disturbing reminiscences of a girl named Violet, ending with casual reference to the Alumni Fund. The publication of gossip columns, bulletins, the use of cartoons, the sending of telegrams, fake and bona fide, with every imaginable advertising layout are all devices by which the agent, in panic and desperation, seeks to woo the wallets of his erstwhile neighbors on Hanover Plain.

The chore of correspondence, when mailing pieces fail, however, is the final phase of the campaign which brings the unsettled mind, the vague distraction, the glassy eye. One knows that Bob Merriwell, out in East Cupcake, lowa, has plenty of what it takes, that he is a howling booster— always was; yet all one's propaganda has bounced off him without so much as a dull thud. His gift finally arrives by wire on the deadline date, with some cheery reference to his delight in contributing, and expression of surprise at not havingbeen solicited earlier.

Agents go temporarily insane at this juncture, and naturally so; for the fateful deadline has approached with all the inevitability of doom, the disturbing statistics of other classes have ticked steadily out of Hanover, and the race, seemingly, has become as improbable as Alice's run with the Red Queen, when it took "all the running you can do to keep in the same place."

And so it goes. Each year the agents, out of what can only be the goodness of their hearts, go doggedly through this harrowing performance, are thanked, and breathlessly told of next year's higher objective. Next year! If they've lived throug one they can stand another. It's a martyr's cause, but a great one, and the day should have dawned long since, when we who are the causes of their perennial desperation shall rise up and call them blessed.

SKETCHES BY TED GEISEL '35 (DR. SUESS) USED BY CLASS AGENTS IN F UND CAMPAIGN MATERIAL. CAPTION OF SKETCH AT THE LEFT WAS "I HATE TO DO THIS JOHNNIE BOY. .. .BUT THE ALUMNI FUND MUST GO ON!"