GRADUS AD PARNASSUM

WEBSTER HALL is miserably inadequate. You may say: "Where have I heard this before?" Having just come from the exercises opening the College's 172 nd year we are ready to begin where we left off last time and damn the situation that leaves Dartmouth without an auditorium large enough to seat the student body and faculty.

There is no occasion of the College year, lot even Commencement, as important as Convocation. It is a moving experience when the College assembles for the opening exercises. One feels then the surge of life and vitality that arouses Hanover from summer slumber to one of the busiest spots in the country. For the natives it is an annual miracle to see the town taken over by 2400 lusty youths. They fill the sidewalks, am the restaurants, and tackle the adventure of college with high spirits.

The climax of those first few days comes When the large family convenes for prayer, songs, and President Hopkins' opening address. It is a large family and they sit in the aisles, stand in the corners, and hang from the rafters. Some arrive at the scene and are turned away for lack of space. Others never start, knowing Webster Hall is a small, stuffy, uncomfortable apology for a gathering place of the whole Dartmouth community.

There has been a lot of talk about the new Center—for music, drama, and radio— and primarily to provide an auditorium. There will continue to be talk but also action, we hope.

IT is FORTUNATELY possible, as we go to press, to include generous abstracts from President Hopkins's opening address. One year ago the keynote of his Convocation remarks, in reference to the international situation, was "This too will pass." At the beginning of his informal talk last month he said he must retract those words and instead say "This will not pass"— within the lifetimes of living generations.

Having thus stated the interminable nature of the conflict and its consequences, he attacked the "counterfeit, spurious, and fake" liberal intellectualism of those in the American colleges who clothe themselves in liberalism falsely. The President indicted colleges as characterizing, to the country at large, breeding places of cynicism. He called for an immediate change of attitudes. There was no mistaking his emphasis in asking the academic community to forego destructive criticism. The address is reassuring in its frank acceptance of blame for failure of the colleges, which he said must be accepted by his own generation of educators and teachers. It is reassuring for the head of the College to ask faculty and students, in no uncertain terms, to avoid the sterility of an intellectualism that has created attitudes in youth entirely foreign to the nation's welfare.

From here on there should be no alibis. Youth's alibi has been that they "were taught to be skeptical." Their elders have accepted the blame. The slate is wiped clean. Intellectual ism cannot be remote from the world.

Matriculation: President Hopkins officially admits Freshman David Parks of Des Moines, la.