The Undergraduate Chair

Dartmouth Students Return from Christmas Vacation To Face a New Decade, Rid of "Limping Thirties"

IT is A SAD but true fact that no matter how strong a college man an undergraduate is, no matter how prominent a position he holds on his campus, whether he goes to a college in the East or in the Southwest, he is still just another college boy home for his vacation at Christmas time. Dartmouth is certainly no exception to the rule. Its 2400 undergraduates leave for their homes filled with stories to tell the folks at home or anyone else who will listen to them among their groups of friends. Parents are willing to listen; but the friends have just as many stories to tell. The Dartmouth green becomes just one more color in the tremendous Christmas collegiate uproar and its undergraduates lose all identity as part of Dartmouth College; you can't very well wear a numeral sweater to a New Year's Eve party.

That may have been one of the reasons why so many of the undergraduates returned to Hanover as much as a week before college opened. They were looking for their lost identity. But whatever the reasons for their returning to college early, there was one thing that all of them were thinking about: "This is a new decade. We may have been too young to understand fully the impact of the twenties on the one we have just passed, but how will the last one effect the one just beginning?"