The Undergraduate Chair
College Nears Close of Year Characterized by Shifting Tides of Sentiment and Fruitless Search for Unity
THIS HAS BEEN a strange year. This has been the year in which we changed our minds. Last year we were college boys who were sure that our world was being spoiled by a war we wanted no part of. Next year we will be young soldiers or college boys about to become soldiers. This year we had to try to go on at college while our ideas were changed and we changed ourselves.
All people with public voices—professors, visiting lecturers, writers, and published or vocal thinkers generally—made much of us. They told us to change our minds and they told us why. Considering how big the world is, it's remarkable that so many of them told us the same things. Men of the College—editorialists, debaters, bull-session leaders—wondered out loud during the year about what was changing us and whether it was good and where it would all end.
No wonder some of us felt like dissecting-table specimens. Those of us with public speech had to speak loudly and distinctly in order to be heard above the roar of the many others who had thought the whole thing through and come up with the infallible anwser. Those of us with private thought and other business had to develop good resistance against the assaults, entreaties and seducements of the orators.
Next year there will be action and almost everyone will be able to give up thinking. Debating will be less prevalent. That will be more comfortable for those who like comfort primarily. The vigor of next year's war will be as soothing to troubled minds and hearts as was the vigorous scorn of last year's isolationism. This year is a seat of the pants full of nettles.
Somebody remarked the other day that nowadays an optimist is a man who believes that the future is uncertain. There have been optimists at Dartmouth all year, but their number has been decreasing. Some of them were public thinkers who declined to follow their own arguments to their logical conclusions. They could see an uncertain future and even hold out hope for a better world in spite of their own worst observations. But most of the optimists have been private thinkers who built idea-proof shelters against the thunder and lightning of oratory that has been directed against them.
It is not remarkable that this should be true. Each man has to build his own defenses against the assaults, entreaties and seducements of the world. Each man stays interested in his own life: for most of us. we would rather do a good job, have a fine family and a few good friends, and follow our own noses, than die young. This has always been true, and the pundits who attack the younger generation for refusing to shoulder responsibility show startling lack of acquaintance with the facts of history. No war has ever been really popular with the people who had to fight it. These days, with the advertising business what it is, it's easier to sell a war to the soldiers; but in the days of our Revolution, for instance, Washington's army once numbered 981 men, and there were never more than 25,000 men active out of a population of 2,500,000.
Dartmouth students are pretty well trained to question announced motives and intentions; so most of us are pretty sure we haven't been sold a bill of goods. Sometimes our reluctance to be convinced has been comic. The night Hitler marched on Yugoslavia one lad shook his head and said, "That settles it. This is too much. I could see the other countries, but this is really uncalled for." A couple of us hooted, and he said, very seriously and pretty wisely, "Don't laugh. That's just the conversion of an isolationist. We decided we didn't want to fight, so we found excuses for everything that would bring us closer to the fight. I can't find any more excuses."
Always there is that reluctance to take the final step. The majority of us admit that we have to help England win the war, or face an infinitely greater danger if Hitler wins; yet almost none of us will admit that this probably involves death for some of us. We make our armor, knowing subcon- sciously that next year we will be dependent on the army for armor; so this year has had an unreal quality to it, nightmarish at times—football week-ends and wild parties and the gaiety of a bright college year outdoing itself for what most of us admit is probably the last time in a long time.
For most of the year the College has been terribly split up. There haven't been many big campus-wide controversies: the split has been individual; the tendency toward atomization. Students left for naval reserve cruises, for the army air corps or for places and reasons unknown. There was a fantastic amount of cutting—so to 70 cuts a semester in some cases. Men worked in spurts, even as the war progressed in spurts, and opinion about the war flickered high and low.
The College was focussed for awhile only by the football victory over Cornell. That was an unlooked-for shot in the arm. Before that damp November afternoon the football team had mirrored the College. It was disorganized, not much more than halfhearted (except against Princeton), and ridden by bad breaks. Something happened on the football field that was more important than Red Friesell's reversing his decision about the fifth down two days late. The important victory was that of the team over its own inertia and molecularity. That victory drew the College together, and the riotous, spontaneous rallies of Monday afternoon and Monday night were the outpouring of high spirits too long contracted and unable to find a channel. COLLEGE FINDS ITSELF AGAIN
Then the College was Dartmouth again, not Dartmouth by virtue of pines and birches and the whitewashed buildings and the library tower alone, but by virtue of having found itself and become one again.
The oneness carried over for quite awhile. But in the winter months it began to fail. Winter Carnival was a good party even if it did rain; it was a better party than Fall Houseparties, when the administration's new policy of preparing strong soldiers for the republic by forbidding the excessive consumption of alcohol first went into effect. That fall week-end, when the year was already half on the rocks and no one knew where from why, everything was quiet and low-spirited. Carnival was still too well-behaved—because a good rowdy party is an expression of a healthy body and a healthy mind, more often than notbut it was more free and easy than Fall.
Soon after that, and as the spring doldrums came, it grew obvious that the College was once again in need of a focus. None has yet been found. Now in the warm days of spring we have fun with baseball and leisurely, picnicky week-ends at Hamp and Wellesley. The year comes toward its end and no one has yet succeeded in defining it except as a year of change and confusion. The sun shines brightly on the far wing of Baker, and just above the bright red bricks is a sky of dark and purple clouds banked against each other.
Every day is as uncertain as that, bright sun suddenly against dark clouds. In Hanover we look at the sun. It is a senselessly unserious world we make. At our best, we admit that: we laugh and say, "Oh well, last time arouxid you know." So we toss the morning paper aside and go walk down by the river, moving big and brown in the sun. We have come a long way through winter since the Cornell victory and the historic rallies which were perhaps a subconscious group effort to recapture the spirit and for a little while hold on to something solid in a crazy world. We have read a lot of headlines, and we still, despite our rationalism and our historically-grounded cynicism about causes and ideals, need a banner to group under just as other men do.
Lacking a banner we walk slowly in the warm spring evenings, talk and laugh with our friends, continue to regard our studies with a tolerant air, and occasionally buckle down to a fit of remorseful work. Yet we know that things move fast and there is no chance, at 500 miles an hour, to go back and correct a mistake. Decisions will have to be made very soon by a lot of boys who now spend their days studiously avoiding decisions. Responsibility will very soon have to be assumed by students who at this moment wouldn't recognize the weight of a responsibility if it turned into a cat and jumped up on their shoulders.
The College, working through the American Defense Dartmouth Group, is making an effort to educate men out of this well-bred casualness and to discourage them from their molecularity, by emphasizing courses which will be of practical help in the defense effort. Last month's deadline for choosing electives was postponed a week to allow men to consult with instructors as to what science courses would best prepare them for military training, as well as what social science courses would help them to an understanding of why the war is being fought.
PARADOX MARKS YEAR
But the human orneriness and especially the human desire to go on living, each man his own life, always remain; probably a lucky thing, too. Even the men who have followed their thought through to the point where they are in favor of scrapping the half-hearted, craven phrase, "all aid short of war," and sending convoys and planes and men; even the men who feel that bombs are not too drastic a way to stir America out of complacency and false security; even these have a certain understandable reluctance about being killed personally. The pretty paradox of the year 1940-1941 at Dartmouth College is nutshelled in this split between conviction and desire. We know, or feel, or somehow suspect, that we can't go live our own lives if we don't defeat Hitler; we are even aware of the fact that some of us may die if we put this conviction into action; but we are annoyed about it. Our world is most pleasant ant, right now, from where we sit. A lot of us would like to make it more pleasant for more people. So we are annoyed by this war which is going to occupy our attention and bust up our pleasant world and postpone our chance to spread the pleasantness around a little. We'll fight it, though.
Is that all right?
Knights in armor or ostriches in the sand, we have gone to Dartmouth this year one way or another. We always had the swing of the seasons. We had the shortest mudtime and the quickest spring that anyone could remember, so that our topcoats were off and we were in shirtsleeves sitting on the Senior Fence long before we had a right to expect it. We had the driest Fall Houseparties and the wettest Carnival in years. We look forward to a great blast at Green Key, and to a slow-moving May which will let us down easy into the sudden summertime of decision and responsibility.
We had the things you remember: sunset over Vermont, birches on Balch Hill, skiing on the Headwall, the Glee Club on the steps of Dartmouth (time-honored phrase for nostalgia), the leaves turning, snow falling through the streetlight's sheen, the Connecticut both moving and ice-locked, friends to laugh with and be serious with, nights for drinking and singing, mornings when we squinted at a new fact or a new way of looking at things.
We were under a lot of pressure. No wonder some of us retreated. No wonder a lot of us found it hard to be good Dartmouth men, responsible citizens of the world, and our own men, all at the same time. Some other year we can tell this year's story the way it needs to be told.
WORKSHOP PRODUCT Virgil Poling (left), director of the newStudent Workshop, watches two undergraduates put the finishing touches on anOuting Club cabin door. The workshop,a beehive of activity in Bissell Hall,opened in February.
