Of Thee We Sing
As WE CHANGED INTO a white shirt for the Cleveland Symphony concert in good old Webster Hall last month it occurred to us that an issue or two of this MAGAZINE has gone by without asking how long, how long, will it be before Dartmouth College will have any place except the football stadium big enough to seat the student body, faculty, and friends. Between the halves of that thrilling program of powerful music we looked around and failed, as we expected to fail, to find more than a scattered few of the student body. The audience was mostly faculty and wives, and neighbors from the countryside.
Just a few of the worst seats in the house (at $2 for one concert) were empty. Most of the hall is filled by season ticket holders (at $5 for four concerts), and the majority of these are not undergraduates. We understand that students do not buy season tickets in larger numbers because they cannot secure decent seats—the patrons of the series year after year renew their tickets and sit in the same good seats. That is the system. We feel that no one can blame the system because there simply are not enough good seats to fill all the applications and therefore the regular, perennial customers have the privilege of hanging onto good locations from one season to the next. That's probably fair, and good business. But the discouraging fact remains that a great orchestra gave a great concert at DartmouthCollege and a pitiful percentage of the College was present.
If the new auditorium were available for such dramatic occasions in the College year prices for single and series admission could be scaled down to a lower figure that would appeal to more students.... the place would be packed to the ceiling with a crowd of 2500 or 3000 .... the whole College in Hanover would be brought together in one place for memorable evenings. .. .Dartmouth would sense its unity, its devotion to things in common, which now only sporadically (when we win a Saturday football game on Monday) do we understand.
Whether the Dartmouth Center has elevators and stars' dressing rooms is not so important. That the Dartmouth Center will provide a place for the whole College to meet together is important. Very damn important.
