The Undergraduate Chair
Student Body Reacts Variously to Approaching Final Exams, Which Editor Calls Academic Roman Banquet
WE WILL STUDY at least six hours every day, we will study at least six hours every day, we will study at least six hours every day, we will study at least six hours every day, we will study at least six hours every day, we will study at least six hours every day, we will study at least six hours every day, we will study at least six hours every day, we will study at least six hours every day, we will study at least
"Maybe six hours is too much."
Thus The Dartmouth, written last year but true today and tomorrow. These are the times that try men's souls. The gay spirits who spent the fall days in touch football and the early winter in skiing and Christmas egg-nogs now have the hurried rabbity look of the tardy scholar.
Ja hear about Joe? He was coming outof the stacks the other day when he slippedand fell and he was carrying so many bookson the rise of nationalism in post-warCzechoslovakia that they broke three ribs.
Lissen, how can I sum up the Romanticschool in French literature in a hundredpages, read those two books for the finaland still get to the Nugget? Use your head.
I was sitting in Eccy the other day feeling sort of worried because I hadn't doneany assignments in the big book since Yaleweek-end when the prof says "I supposeyou gentlemen have finished both texts bynow." Both texts! Nobody else knew whatthe other one was either.
No sir! Not tonight! I gotta review theseven reproductive systems of the brachiopoda.
These remarks document the first paragraph, "We will study at least six hours every day." The second and more succinct paragraph is not documented, only hinted at in phrases: Oh what the hell.
How about a shake down at Allen's?Well look, if you don't get ten hourssleep before the exam you're no good, areyou?
How ya gonna study if you don't comeskating just for half an hour and clear thecobwebs out of your mind?Tow operating at Oak Hill.
At the Nugget today: "The PhiladelphiaStory."
They can't ask us any questions on thisstuff.
How ya gonna review 32 40-page assignments in three hours?
Do you realize that every single one ofthose classes I cut cost my old man justunder a buck, and look at me now.
Oh what the hell. Don Ameche flunkedout of college.
Even the model student who did every assignment and reviewed his notes on Sundays is scurrying through his loose-leaf and getting ready for writer's cramp. The seniors who have theses due are buried under books, papers, footnotes, reviews and pouchy eyes. One of them spent half a day cataloging his books according to the date due at the library, so he'd be sure not to get fined. Another said, "I read eight books last night. In an hour," and then said, "Let's go to lunch. I've got to read 'The Petrified Forest.' " He finished it midway through dessert.
The examination system has always reminded me of those old Roman banquets at which the guests would systematically stuff themselves and then call for little black pills which induced violent and cleansing regurgitation. Then they went right back to eating.
I'm sorry about this, but it is just true.
Forced feeding and forced regurgitation, the blue book as stomach-pump. What an occupation for growing boys, the little black pill twice a year, the eruption onto the professor in a secondary and preferably unrecognizable form of what he has spoonfed to the student, and then the whole thing to be done over again.
My only conquest of this system was at the end of the first semester in my sophomore year. I simply wrote the same examination four times, in sociology, philosophy, English and English again. It worked like a charm and I got good marks until I bumped into the botany exam, consisting of 150 true-false questions which threw the whole thing out of gear. From that day to this I haven't been able to look a chrysostome in the eye.
Christmas vacation was like time out. A lot of the boys came back reporting a strange other-worldliness about the gaiety and the many parties. New York seemed more hectic than ever, and Suburbia with the blue Christmas-tree lights and the highpitched voices in the crowded drawingroom was as phoney as a Hollywood epic.
Everybody was having fun and there was no self-consciousness about it, but it was too screechy. Instead of a Christmas made sober by the large slugs of world-soberness in the headlines, this Christmas most people seemed intent on having a big splash as if for the last time.
"Perhaps next Christmas we won't be together," they would say.
Most everybody seemed to be avoiding newspapers and radio newscasts. And there was a big difference in the war-talk: mostly an absence of it, strange for boys who were told last year that they were jaded and cynical if they didn't want to fight. And worst of all a hint, a growing suspicion that the big boys who were all for war last year are now taking cover with the thought that profits may really be limited in wartime, the thought that an attempt to play ball with Germany is the safe way to save their fortunate yesterday from which the bombs are slowly chipping the gold-leaf.
These things you thought about after you came back to the snow-piled streets of Hanover. At home you laughed and chattered and drank the hot rum punch with gratitude, and dodged newscasts with the rest of them. Everyone played ostrich and had a wonderful time-out: but maybe there were many who didn't notice the change because they had been enjoying a time-out right along.
Those who take military training in the hope of gaining soft instructors' berths when a war comes.
Those who by their rioting and irresponsibility cause curbs and slanders to be put on the whole group.
The ones who are out for a good time while the getting is possible.
The ones who quite honestly don't give a damn.
Those who seriously doubt that their attention to large world-moving events will change the course of those events.
Voice from the rear: You mean the majority?
The majority.
Now and always.
Come off it, pal, you're just nursing a hangover after too much partying.
After reaching this conclusion I find a sheet of yellow paper discarded in Robinson Hall, with typewriting on it: "'Life is earnest, life is real.'
"The times are such that I find myself regarding this discovery with a certain amount of unwilling humility. Unfortunately the word was handed down by Longfellow, who has become more and more in disfavor as I , have advanced from the fourth grade."
The writer obviously is a literary doodler of the first rank. Over against the evidence he presents, however, must be considered the case of the undergraduate who set out to heap a few hailstones on the umbrellas of the appeasers. He wanted to organize a committee to hold a mass meeting in favor of aid to Britain. Someone said that it would be foolish to have it before exams, as interest would subside again by the time exams were over. The honest ax-grinder replied, "Hell, if we wait till after exams I probably won't be interested any more myself." He thought a bit and then added, "Besides, by then they may have done what we're trying to get them to do."
This astonishing confession of a man who wants to do something violent, just for something violent to do, is without precedent in my experience. The confession, I mean: I've known lots of them who were always looking for something violent to do just for the sake of doing it. But none of them ever confessed it before, nor on such a life-and-death subject.
One of the recurring battles of a Dartmouth man is to see that his College gets fair representation before the public. That the battle is lost two or three times every year does not detract from the gallantry of the gladiators, who face the overwhelming odds of a public which has already made up its mind about Dartmouth and does not wish to be disturbed with further thoughts. Thus when Life sends a photographer to Hanover to get pictures of Dartmouth students going out on a bat-banding expedition, one can only grit one's teeth and organize a counter-expedition for photographer-banding. This same photographer also snapped an essay in pictures on the subject of Dartmouth jalopies ("Dartmouth men do anything to avoid walking" was the theme). These are no doubt photogenic topics, and one of them is respectably scientific, but imagine the reaction of 20,000,000 Life readers who start with the handicap of having always referred to the school as "Darth-mouth."
None of these essays has as yet appeared in Life. Keep your fingers crossed. The only topic that might have made those pages was vetoed by Life's man here. A helpful student suggested an essay on the sociological cal significance of the waitresses downtown, and after a cursory examination of the waitresses the Life man said, "Nope, they got too many clothes on."
Ah there, Henry Luce. Ah there, sociological significance.
The latest assault comes from Paramount Pictures, which is willing to photograph the band in action at the Green Key prom, provided the band is "of national importance." Green Key is keeping negotiations open, but has been threatened with mass lynching if it gives Paramount the goahead on an assignment which can only represent young Dartmouths to the nation as jitterbugs or worse.
The Outing Club has not invited Mrs. Roosevelt to Carnival as we go to press, but there are still several weeks remaining. So far Governor Blood of New Hampshire is the only celebrity signed up for the galagala on February 7 and 8, and to him falls the legitimately delightful task of helping choose the Carnival Queen. Rumors that Linda Darnell, Lana Turner and Betty Grable have been offered the crown are indignantly denied by everybody.
It would be nice to write a smoothly flowing essay on life in Hanover this month, with no wisecracks, no preciousness, no acidity, and no gloom. It would be quite dishonest, however. Hanover is pretty much the world, for us lads: a week-end at Smith or Wellesley hardly counts as an excursion into any exterior reality. And the world for any given month in its history does not present a topic for a smoothly flowing essay. Unless I've been studying the wrong histories. Like the world, Hanover is many impressions in a month, wisecracks, preciousness, acidity, and gloom: this month tempers shorter than usual, the vacation to split things up, the exams, the gloom of the world and the world's ostrichism.
—and a half inch of powder on a twelveinch base, temperature falling, skiing fair.
NEW ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION AND HIS DEPARTMENT HEADGeorge L. Scott '25 (left), newly appointed to the Department of Education, confers withProfessor Ralph A. Burns. Scott has received the M.A. degree from Boston University,and has taught in both public and private preparatory schools.
