The Undergraduate Chair

Dartmouth Will Be Different This Year, Editor Believes After Summer Hitchhiking Trip Across the Nation

I GOT OUT OF THE undergraduate chair in June and bummed across the country and back, 7000 miles in eight weeks. From what I saw and heard I would guess that Dartmouth will be different this year. Of course no two years are ever alike, but bright college years have a sameness it takes a generation or a war to shatter. This time it's a war, and a reaction to the war that is beginning to jell in the people's living.

America starts on the outer beach at Cape Cod, which meets the Atlantic and no kidding. It reaches way west. Its biggest noise comes from its highest buildings, in New York. The old houses and the streets of our ancestors lie through a narrow strip remembered as the rebellious Thirteen Colonies. In Boston there are a lot of crooked alleys and famous buildings, houses where Washington slept and houses marked "The Cradle" of something or other; and when you ask a California-bound Boston man what route he's taking west, he says "By way of West Newton." The people in this part of the country can't see Europe; they can feel it.