News of The Faculty
OVER IN BAKER LIBRARY it takes three men to answer questions put daily by some of the 2400 students. Paul Allen, O. L. Lilley, and Francis Batchelder take turns at the little corner desk marked Reference. These are some of the questions put by puzzled undergraduates. "How can I write a report on any subject?" "Who was the Harvard coach before Casey?" "Where can I get the speeches of President Hopkins?" "Who wrote Grapes of Wrath?" "What is Hermeticism?" "Does Manlius have military ski teams?" "Where can I find the picture of a Porpoise?" "Who was Aunt Mary?" "Who were the Fox Sisters?" "Who wrote Casey at the Bat?" "Where can I find Hindu Drama?" "Baseball versus Football Salaries" (Not Found). "Where can I find a summary of the Odyssey?" "Comparison of modern trade unions and mediaeval guilds," "Public vs. private schools," "Instruments used in blind flying," "Influence of Locke on American government," "Relations between the Confederate States and Great Britain." The star question of the month came from a boy who asked, "What is my sister-in-law's name?" It seems that the boy's brother had been recently married, and the bride's name was found by looking up the marriage notice in the New York Times Index.
When Professor E. Bradlee Watson of the English Department returned from his Sabbatical, he brought news of an interesting conference to be held this summer at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. It is designated by the library as an English Renaissance Conference, to include the period from the introduction of printing to about 1660. Members of the research staff and visiting scholars will participate. The present idea is to select specific topics in the history of the Renaissance, such as problems dealing with belles-lettres, historiography, and the literature of science, religion, geography, and economic and social conditions. The dates are Aug. 19, 20, and 21. Members of the Dartmouth faculty are invited.
To the list of physicians at the Dartmouth Eye Clinic has been added the name of Dr. Arthur Linksz, a native of Czechoslovakia. His post is Fellow in Ophthalmology. As the Eye Clinics has drawn to its staff men with degrees from universities all over the world, Dr. Linksz has already served on university and clinic groups in three countries. His first medical degree was from the University of Kiel in Germany; a similar degree was awarded by the University of Pecs, Hungary. He was formerly a research fellow in the University of Praga, then at the Physiological Institute at Kiel,—later served as interne in the Jewish Hospital in Budapest. He was from 1937 to 1939 chief physician of the Eye Department at the Budapest Orthodox Hospital. He is the author of more than 30 scientific papers, a member of the Royal Society of Physicians of Budapest, and the Hungarian Ophthalmological Society.
Dartmouth has a big time columnist. He does his stunt for the Boston Transcript. In the College he teaches Spanish, but when in print he unleashes brain-teasers upon the intellectuals. His name is John H. Cutler. Sample of his Column,—"Who Is It?"
"A New England conscience has been defined as 'one that doesn't prevent you from doing anything, but that keeps you from enjoying it afterwards.' Today's curio preferred only one thing to being famous, and that was being infamous. This playboy for Europe hovered uncertainly between gutter and stars. He was the type of arch-villain you would expect to find in a melodrama like 'Tillie and Her Punctured Romance.' And yet he was the leading poet of his age.
"He disliked beginning anything on Friday He had a club-foot Of his father, who died like a gentleman, he said, 'My father cut his throat.' .... He boasted he could write best while under the influence He practiced languishing glances before the mirror 'I am as vain of my curls as a girl of 16.' ... .
"One of his teachers was his shoemaker's son When he was 24 he wrote, 'I awake one morning and find myself
famous.' .... Greece gave him an honorable burial, but England barred his remains from Westminster Abbey."
WHO IS IT?
News of a departure in the method of interesting men intending to be teachers comes from Professor Ralph A. Burns, chairman of the Department of Education. Beginning this fall, such students will elect a major in that department, and will take other work in the college which will enable them to get backgrounds enough in at least two subjects, in order to meet not only the requirements of the State Board of Education, but also the demands of small schools where teachers usually handle at least two subjects each. Thus there will be combinations such as English-History, Latin-French, French-German, FrenchSpanish, Mathematics-Physics, Mathematics-Chemistry, and others, and along with this the student will select the necessary courses in Education. When it comes to comprehensive examinations at the end of senior year, the student will take three examinations, as most students do at present, but one will be in the first subject, say English, in which the man will have completed 18 hours of work above the elementary courses. The second examination will cover his second subject, History, for example, and the third will be in the field of Education. Each examination will be prepared by the department involved, but the taking of the examinations will be supervised by the Department of Education. Already eight men have elected this new Education major.
Assistant Professor Henry S. Odbert of the Department of Psychology has been awarded a fellowship by the Social Science Research Council, in order to work out a research problem which deals with the interrelationships between ideas and words. He will do this work, chiefly at Harvard under Dr. I. A. Richards, but may possibly spend some time at Princeton in order to complete the work. The study grew out of the color-music research noted in this column last year, but the research spreads in this instance into the field of general language comprehension. Professor Odbert is a Dartmouth man in the class of 1930.
