The Undergraduate Chair

College Year, Now Approaching Its Close, Has Been Notable Only for Things That Make Up the Dartmouth Experience

THE EDITOR of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE has a fine sense of humor and tosses off little bits of whimsey as though he were a duck shedding drops of water. His latest joke—which turned out to be all too serious—was the request that the author of the Undergraduate Chair give a resume of the college year, pointing out the highlights, scraping down the bumps, and uncovering little known facts. The highlights are there; so are the bumps and the little known facts, but sorting them out isn't the healthy joke it at first appeared to be.

There was September with its green foliage beginning to turn into browns and reds on the hills rimming Hanover, and there were the pea-green freshmen who were looking at their first Dartmouth fall sunsets. Six hundred and fifty of them wandered about the campus getting acquainted—or "orientated" as the College bulletin is wont to call it—and sitting next to strangers in Commons and leaving the dining tables as life-long friends. Upperclassmen looked blas6 about returning to college, except the seniors; they looked as novice-like as the freshmen for they had as much to do in one year as the first year men intended to do in four years.