The Undergraduate Chair
Carnival Gaiety Over, Students Enter Upon New Semester Pondering Cut System, Senior Exams and War Problems
THURSDAY MORNING CAME on sunnyand the south slopes were runningslush by noon, the way you could tellit was the January thaw a little bit delayed.In the afternoon it clouded up to the northward and after supper the first snow fell,down the beam of Baker's tower lights andonto the side-walks. The snow melted whereit hit and we knew then it would be a wetCarnival. By morning it was raining andby evening there xuere pools in Rope FerryRoad and when the skaters fell down onthe Outdoor Evening pond they made littleripples. The Queen had her picture takenwith her hair streaming around her face:she turned the big silver loving cup bottom-side up and the rain water ran out ofit. By Saturday the snow-sculpture waspocked and corroded and the snow was offthe hills or so icy it was uncontrolled skiing all the way. The sun came out brighton Sunday as the girls went home.
It was a good Carnival, The DOC, like the postman, is stayed from the fairly swift completion of its self-appointed chores by neither rain nor sleet nor sun nor dark of night. The business of putting on a well-paced and handsome Outdoor Evening show under the really impressive rainfall was pretty miraculous: but the prevailing Hanover attitude is that the boys could do it just as well in Florida. The crowd which sat or stood under the waterfall and cheered the show was impressive too, and the dog who joined the skating sisters gave the evening the final touch.
There was a thrill in the realization that among the ski-teams were two from countries at war: McGill and the Royal Norwegian Air Force: as well as two from faraway: Wisconsin and Chile. The Norwegians made their escape from Norway after the German occupation and are training in Canada. There is a certain recklessness about their skiing. No one asked why. Nearly all events these days have some grim backdrop remembering the war, a good element for men who find it increasingly easy to neglect reading the morning paper.
The loss of the Carnival was not reckoned a total loss. Five years in a row seems long enough to be winning any event. And at that New Hampshire won by only a few points gained in the combined jumpinglanglauf. There was a good deal of applause for Captain McLane's performance, taking second in the slalom after winning the downhill and then collapsing in the cross-country with a temperature of 102°: so much applause, in fact, that McLane from his sick bed remarked in embarrassment "the only decent thing left for me to do is to decease as quietly as possible and become a National hero."
It was a good Carnival in the noticeable absence of visiting firemen and people with big commercial ideas. The party was more Dartmouth's than it has been in some time. And, whether because of fate or the administration's prohibition, the drinking was refined and indoors. A few of the old grads looked wistfully about their fraternity barrooms and shook their heads as if they faintly saw ghostly bacchanales and faintly heard ribald singing; but the surprising fact remains that nearly everyone seemed to have a good time regardless. There was some resentful and laughing talk about the pompously proper "houseparty regulations" posted on the bulletin boards ("Chaperones are required out of deference to propriety," etc.), but even that didn't interfere with the party.
Remember the rain. Remember the goodtime, and the girl sleepy-eyed at seven butstill game for scrambled eggs or an admiring shake of the head at the dawn. Remember the sun on Sunday, the walk up Observatory Hill, the last milk-punch, and thevoice sounding over the conversationallull: "When the duck is in the wolf's stomach, is it still a duck or is it dead?"
The strange paradox of an unlimitedcut system which called itself a no-cut system is beginning to resolve itself. The resolution seems headed in the direction of heavier emphasis on the no-cutting, as over against the unlimited-cutting. When the system was started two and a half years ago the one rein held by the administration was that if a man cut so much his professor thought his work was suffering from it, he could be put on probation. Comes now the news that 52 members of the sophomore class are on probation-warning for overcutting the first semester. Some of them really cut, too: 50 to 70 times, rumor says. That corresponds to spending three or five weeks in Florida and must take some ingenuity. You can't oversleep every day.
A professor remarked that it was pretty discouraging to lecture to so few students. 102 upperclassmen are on warning, 18 were separated and 7 suspended. Forty or seventy or fifty-five (depending on who told it) men flunked eccy one. And the same way with geology. Who will say what is happening? It is a subconscious machinery in operation, akin to that which is producing so many engagements and marriages. This last is on the deep-rooted biological plane and the academic sluggishness is on the let's-make-whoopee plane. The world is very small these days, there is support for the lease-lend bill, the draft grows closer, Norwegian pilots ski at Carnival, and "No man is an Hand, intire of its selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were: any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."
The tightening hand of probation and E's marks a symptom of the tolling bells and the restriction of private license. Another symptom is the barring of 28 students from the library for taking out books illegally. Drastic action counter-balances drastic (or thoughtless but violent or violating) action, violence breeds violence, and this thing will grow by what it feeds on.
A more comic example of how small the mills of the educational process do grind was furnished by the Carnegie Graduate Record Examinations which all the seniors spent eight hours over, for a couple of bootless afternoons. ("Bootless" I learned from a question on the Verbal Factor, subtest 1, 20 minutes; it's the opposite of "useful.") The exams were objective-type, very objective-type indeed; multiple-choice, quite multiple; designed to test quantity of learning, not quality; and how. The long procession of minute facts assembled by Mr. Dryasdust and his colleague Prof. Nonessential was wonderful to behold. As (check one):
"Edward is a i) sonnet 2) ode 3) ballade 4) ballad."
"If Chaucer were alive today and wrote 'The Legend of Good Women,' it might include 1) Florence Nightingale 2) Jane Addams 3) Elizabeth Barrett Browning 4) Clara Barton 5) Helen Keller."
The whole test was simply a test of your sense of humor: how long could you keep from laughing, how well could you refrain from making the funny answer? The "Good Women" floored me and I wrote "1 2 3 4 5," which was probably in bad taste and certainly lacking in respect.
My favorite was the identification of the prevailing mood of this poetic excerpt: "Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread our eyes upon one double string." Of several choices ("metonymy, Petrarchian sestet," etc.), I chose "pathetic fallacy." That is the stylish verse-form for this year, pathetic fallacy—at least as far as the Carnegie exams go. The whirring noise you hear is the old Scotch iron-puddler rotating in his grave.
Judged by the quantitative or accumulative standard, one question on preferred sentence-structure stated the case concisely: " (Check one) i) The test revealed weaknesses in the course of study, 2) They can see weaknesses in the course of study as revealed by the test, 3) In the test it shows weaknesses in the course of study, 4) It reveals in the test that there are weaknesses in the course of study." All four are correct for Dartmouth, which last year placed last in the list of eight Eastern liberal arts colleges, which took the test: a distinction of which every Dartmouth man has a right to be proud.
The mud-time is coming closer but there are good thoughts to serve as duck-boards. And just over the corner of March looms the spring, and the seniors are planning their spring blast already. Three of them made a pact the other day, "to go out like three comets," with softball on the campus and swimming on the Pomp. The good events we think of are the appointment of Tuss McLaughry as Earl Blaik's successor, for instance, and the great reception given the Players' production of Robert Sherwood's "Abe Lincoln in Illinois." No one was pleased with Mr. Blaik's decision to leave, but everyone appreciated his position in regard to the Army. The tributes to him have been honest and the sense of loss is unaffected. His record at Dartmouth was enviable in every way, not the least of it being that he was always Mister Blaik. Nor will he be forgotten for his speech after the Cornell game when he said "Dartmouth—rugged. Rugged, see? And we want to keep it that way."
Mr. McLaughry seemed the right successor, no question about that.
As for the "Abe Lincoln," it was presented at Carnival with Steve Bradley '39 in the lead and his wife Anne Hurlburt Bradley opposite him as Mrs. Lincoln. Warner Bentley outdid himself in staging a solid, moving show, and the applause was large. There was favorable comparison with the New York production, the supporting cast was highly praised, and for the Bradleys' Lincolns there were cheers. Monday after Carnival Mr. Bentley got a thousand grammar and high school kids into Webster to see the play at a quarter a head, the proceeds going to Britain; and in spite of a warm hall and a lot of coughing, those kids had a wonderful time and were closely attentive and seemed deeply impressed.
"They didn't applaud very much at the end because we told them that nobody applauded after Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address," one of the teachers said.
The Players took the production down to Keene on Lincoln's Birthday as a benefit for the crippled children, and filled a large and dusty theatre there. The reports filtering back from Keene were equally handsome. "Best play we ever saw," said people whose last experience in the theatre was with George White's Scandals.
Another thing that will carry weight for a long time was a speech by Herbert Agar, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, who came here during exams at the invitation of a newly formed local chapter of the Student Defenders of Democracy. Mr. Agar said, "If you're going to call me a warmonger, at least call me a double warmonger," and went on to tell of the two wars we must fight; one to defeat fascism abroad, in order to win time that we may fight the second, more important and evercontinuing fight: the fight right here to make American democracy become a little bit more true, the fight to make sure that the American Revolution continues to be a revolution and continues to be American.
He got down into the questions of ideological difference between fascism and democracy, the impossibility of living in a fascistdominated world, the need that sometimes arises for fighting, and the chance to go on fighting for something positive. It was original, profound and beautifully delivered: a large audience stayed for two hours (unheard of in Hanover) and went away pretty well convinced that it had heard the best lecture in years—the best ever, many thought.
That didn't prevent a good campus battle from blowing up over the question of feeding the "five small democracies," with the Christian Union supporting Mr. Hoover's plan against The Dartmouth and some other voices. The presence in the background as the month wore on was that of the spring, the same spring that would bring Softball to Hanover perhaps bringing a Nazi invasion of the British islands; and the question, Can we help? and still from some the question, Do we want to?
There were long days of sun, and thesnow curling over the tips of the skis, theparty days and the nights skating at Occomwider the moon. Then the clouds wouldpile up and the wind take on the knifeedge for rawing faces and the shadows pileover the print of the book as the old questions stirred again. Turn on the light, lad,or settle before the fire for some talk andthe old songs; perhaps it will not comeafter all, the day when turning on thelight will not drive away the shadows, theday when the clouds pile over the sun andyou must answer quickly to the question.
NEW HAMPSHIRE GOVERNOR PICKS THE WINNER Governor Robert O. Blood '13m, one of the judges in the 1941 Carnival Queen contest,raises the triumphant arm of Miss Joan Walters, daughter of Dr. Waltman Walters '17of Rochester, Minn.
