Concentrate On Excellence
This Is Theme of Bill Cunningham '19, Interviewed On Subject of Providing Education for Poor Boys
[The editors asked Mr. Hurd, author ofthe article in this issue on questions ofpolicy related to expenses, financial aid,and admissions at Dartmouth, to talk withBill Cunningham 'l9, of the Boston Post and now a member of the Alumni Council,who has ivritten and spoken on this general subject. The interview with him is reported below.—ED.]
ON THE TOP OF BOSTON'S Beacon Hill and hidden away in a small apartment, the walls of which are covered with the signed photographs of famous athletes, lives Bill Cunningham '19, who comments on sport with Elizabethan flamboyance of language and who, while decrying his knowledge of problems academic with a reticence often unknown to persons unconnected with education, can comment pithily about the good college. Papers from many parts of the country lie eight inches deep on the chairs and sofa, his typewriter is buried in a drift of newsprint, but his Steinway Grand stands outside the storm belt.
Toying with a policeman's billy (a station near Boston has just made him an honorary cop), which looks little in his large hands, Bill says that he is superstitious about Dartmouth and the color of his college, and one has only to talk with him for five minutes to see that here is an alumnus who means what he says when he insists that football is exciting and a great game, but that if Dartmouth should drop it for necessary reasons he would support her and love her through any possible days of ill repute.
You know of course what Bill, with his columns of sports writing coloring his thinking, is going to say? Dartmouth is cultivating country club values too fast and its green fruit is ripening to a golden brown saplessness? The lean frames of its athletes quiver with an obesity unknown before the fleshy and fleshly Nineteen Twenties? Too much attention is paid to books, and the undergraduates, stooped with much desk work, are wearing thick lenses on eyes no longer able to face the glare of light on snow and the flare of life anywhere else?
You are wrong. Bill talks in terms of mind, not muscle.
"Dartmouth is producing a lot of easygoing Babbitts, future presidents of Rotary Clubs," says Bill in terms not easily misunderstood. "Let's leave football out of the picture for a moment. Studies are the most important, the development of mind and the nuturing of—well, let me say it—spiritual values. I tell you, we are not getting the kind of men we ought to have. The College is fostering too many mediocrities, and I regret it. Excellence is what the faculty and the administration should concentrate on. We need the A man, the thinker who can understand the problems of the world and help to solve them. I want Dartmouth to produce great scientists, great writers, great political leaders, great educators. Well, where are they? Who ever hears of them? I travel about the country, and I don't. Dartmouth is the C minus man's paradise.
"And on the faculty we want leaders and inspirers of youth. Who are the inspiring names in Hanover now? Tell me, I want to know them."
Asked about the desirability of drawing on the untapped sources of power from the hundreds of thousands of families who cannot give a son the minimum which an applicant to Dartmouth ordinarily must have, Bill expressed views that are unorthodox and contrary to what you might expect from a man who himself worked his way through Dartmouth.
"I get less and less capable of believing that the very poor boy has a place in Hanover or that it is desirable for him to try to go. No, I tell you that I don't want to scour the backlots of the country for football stars who have only brawn and no brains to recommend them. I have just come back from the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas where the tuition is only $50 a year, where the students live in newly built barracks paid for with government money, and where all they have to provide themselves with is a couple of military hats. It is the people's college. Let the average poor boys go to some place like that. That's what it's built for."
Bill looks up to see how you are taking such remarks and adds decisively, "Don't think that I am getting snobbish in my old age. I come back to the central thesis: Dartmouth ought to work harder to get boys with intellectual energy. Now if a boy whose parents have no money shows that he has such promise that Dartmouth needs him as much as he needs Dartmouth, we ought to take him. Maybe we haven't the money? I don't know. But make sure that he has brains and plenty of them. We talk too much sentimentality, don't you think, about the glorious virtues of the poor, their ability to infuse life into a college? My guess is that they can be as mentally lazy as the middle classes."
On the subject of football and Dartmouth athletic future Bill speaks with more confidence and greater picturesqueness of language. He feels that Dartmouth is honest and living up to the letter and spirit of the law about subsidizing athletes. He believes that the College has leaned over backwards in trying to keep its hands clean and in trying to show the world, which is nothing if not sceptical, that the College accepts only gentlemanly boys from gentlemanly homes.
Has Bill any proposal about Dartmouth football? On this point Bill emphasized again his keen interest in seeing Dartmouth pick only men who have the brains to make good in highly creditable fashion. Football is a game that he loves and that he and doubtless the vast majority of alumni feel has fine values for the College. Providing the good athlete is outstanding as a prospective Dartmouth man, according the ideals of Bill's definition noted above, and incidentally a football player, then he should be in Hanover. "If anybody protests," Bill Cunningham says, "Dartmouth should simply say 'These men are bona fide students in good standing.' We should hold up our head proudly and make no concessions.
"Now don't get me wrong. I am not arguing that Dartmouth ought to go into big time competition, that we should go out and buy players, that we should make football our god.
"I should back up the Administration," says Bill, "if they wanted to cut out football entirely and go to the mat with any and all persons who call her sissy. I've told you what I feel: Dartmouth is an educational institution that should be developing the best minds in the country. But for Heaven's sake, let's have a little light on what we want to do and what we don't want to do."
