War Measures Adopted

President Hopkins Announces Telescoping of College Year To Free Men for Military Service and Essential Work

TO MAKE FORMAL ANNOUNCEMENT of the faculty's adoption of a speed-up plan shortening the college year by five weeks and to discuss, in general, the relation of the College to the national war effort, President Hopkins summoned the Dartmouth student body and faculty to a special convocation in Webster Hall on the morning of Monday, December 15.

The acceleration of work outlined by President Hopkins calls for the elimination of all post-Christmas recesses, the halving of the examination periods in each semester, and the cancellation of party week-ends such as Winter Carnival and Green Key Prom, all of which will effect the release of Dartmouth seniors and other students for military service and wartime tasks by May 10, the new Commencement date.

Approval of this telescoping of the remainder of the college year was voted by the faculty at a special meeting on the night of Saturday, December 13, after the Committee on Educational Policy and the Committee on Defense Instruction had met together to draw up the revised calendar. -The faculty action followed by only a few days the announcement that the Trustees had approved special arrangements to grant degrees to seniors called for military or naval service before the end of the college year (see College Newssection).

Dartmouth further geared itself to the war when the Tuck School and Thayer School announced, shortly after the special convocation, that they would adopt a year-round schedule calling for three full semesters a year instead of two and covering the regular two-year course in sixteen months without any curtailment of complete instruction (also reportedfully in College News).

The vacations which undergraduates will forego after Christmas are the week between semesters and the usual ten-day period for Easter. Final examinations in both semesters will take only one week instead of two and will be scheduled for Sunday and the evenings in order to save time. Members of the senior class will be excused from all course examinations at the end of the second semester and, upon completion of their comprehensive examinations, will actually be through college work on May 1. A simplified Commencement will take place on Sunday, May 10, instead of the original June 14.

President Hopkins announced that Dartmouth would hold to its athletic schedules as fully as possible, although de- tails as to how this can be accomplished remain to be worked out. Decisions also must be made with regard to alumni reunions and other traditional events. Although Winter Carnival is cancelled as a social event, it is expected that the intercollegiate ski meet and other athletic contests will be held as scheduled.

In the general statement of College policy which he made informally and extemporaneously, President Hopkins told the students and faculty that impulsive action at this time would probably be a disservice to the Nation as well as to the individual. He called upon all for clear, responsible thinking, and urged a courageous, hard-working acceptance of the challenge made to every member of the College.

The full text of his remarks is as follows:

Gentlemen of the Faculty and of the Undergraduate College:

It has seemed desirable at this time to make announcement formally, at least, in regard to the action of the faculty on Saturday evening and to discuss some other matters having to do with the preparedness of the College, even though data concerning the former may be somewhat widespread and despite the fact that all the details were announced on the morning radio broadcast.

On Saturday evening, the faculty, on recommendation of the Committee on Educational Policy, voted that the final examinations of the first semester of the present academic year be held from January 17th, Saturday, at one p.m., through January 24th, Sunday included. Second, that the second semester of the present academic year begin on Monday, January 26th, and end on Sunday, May 10th, which would be Commencement Day. Third, that the February and spring recesses of the present college calendar be eliminated. Fourth, that Saturday, April 25th, be the last day of recitations for seniors. Fifth, that April 28th through May Ist be the period for comprehensive examinations. Sixth, that final examinations be held from May 1 to May 7. Seventh, that members of the senior class shall be freed from all course examinations at the end of the second semester and that instructors shall gain their data and make their appraisal of the work in the different courses according to their own devices. Eighth, that Commencement Day shall be held on Sunday, May 10th.

In other words, the College is consolidating its courses and adapting its program and is going on to a war footing on the two-fold basis of preserving the validity of the work which it is supposed to do and, on the other hand, of making available to the undergraduates the earliest possible completion of the given units of their work. This action is taken, first of all, on the basis of all information which is available to us that in the armed services the first desire is that men shall complete, in so far as may be possible in conformity with the requirements of the draft, the required units of work. I could go into a good deal of detail to explain definitely what is meant by this, but it is. a fact that good men who have been impulsive and who have gone into service prematurely are at the present time being denied advancement which would be available to them if they had completed their college work. Previous action has covered the possibilities of course modifications in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and other work supplementary to preparation for medicine and engineering.

I have no willingness at all to criticize the action of the individual man who decides that something is imperative for him and that he must do it, but I am going to ask the College at this time to give some attention to the carefully considered action which will be advantageous both to the individuals concerned and eventually to the Government. All of the experience of the previous war and all of the theories of the men who have the administration of our national policies at the present time, from the President down, confirm this point of view. Some of us who had to do with the College in the previous war, as did those who had to do with other colleges at that time, will recall the confusion and the dissatisfaction that attended the rush to the armed forces immediately after the declaration of war. I suppose College officers were busiest for the first six months after that trying to get men out of one branch of the service into which they had impulsively flooded themselves and into some other branch where it was evident that they would be more advantageous to the service of the country and better placed for the capitalization of their own resources. More time was spent on that than on anything else.

If there were time, I could tell you in detail about the rush to Newport, the rush to Portsmouth to enlist in the Navy, the discovery that there weren't ships enough for the men who had enlisted, and then the men's wanting to give service and to get out and get into the Army. Or I could tell you about the men who went into the Army and found just the reverse situation, and so forth and so on. We are in a great national emergency and we are in one of the great crises of our history, but perhaps because of that it is necessary that we should think, and should think intelligently and with all the advice that we can get as to what shall be done.

It is with this thought in mind that the faculty has been moving so rapidly and so effectively to shorten the course and to get the credentials into the hands of all Dartmouth men as early as possible. Of course questions occur to you immediately. What about Carnival? Well, Carnival's out. What about the ordinary athletic schedules? In general, we shall hold to the athletic schedules as completely as possible. Even in the Army camps, that has been found to be desirable. But it is going to be hard, intensive work that is required of the undergraduates and incidentally, too, of those who instruct them. There is going to be a continuous emphasis upon the value of what is being offered and the necessity of its being taken. And in this connection I want to make one other statement for a certain type of man who is perfectly capable of doing "A" work but finds "C" entirely satisfactory, and that is that in the armed services at the present time the first query that is made in regard to a man's record is in regard to his scholastic grades. That fact rather wipes aside a good deal of the theorizing that we have had in past years as to the value of scholastic grades and what they are significant of. They are at least significant at the present time of the fact that the man who has them is far better situated so far as his prospects of advancement go than the man who doesn't have them.

I am arguing this morning for the difficult thing—for the difficult attitude for us to take, and I am arguing for it from the point of view of patriotism, if you wish. Last spring, I sat at a dinner with a friend recently returned from Germany, and he had with him a tract which he had secured somewhere in regard to the German psychological preparation for war. He read various passages from this tract, and in connection with it he said that the assumption was widespread throughout the high officialdom of Germany that America would be coming into the war eventually, but that the longer her entry could be delayed and the more her inertia could be encouraged and perpetuated, the greater would be her impulsiveness of action and her hysteria when she did come in. We have had the inertia all right. I think Germany could hardly have wished for more than has been existent, but at length we are in the war, and I hope that now that we are in it, we may at least dispute the validity of the conclusion that having got in it we would become so disorganized through hysteria that all of our efficiency would be destroyed.

There is another matter, too, while we are meeting together here before the Christ mas vacation, about which I want to speak and that is that we shan't play Hitler's game by losing faith in our own institutions. Several groups of students have come to me during the past week with plans for modification of the college course, plans for modification of our attitude toward our social problems, setting up laboratories for social work, and so on, all of them formulated in good faith and presented persuasively, but under the argument that unless they were adopted the College wouldn't live. Well, in response to that I want just simply to emphasize the fact that the College life isn't primarily dependent upon programs or schedules. The College has lived through crisis after crisis and the College will continue to live.

The question is simply whether or not we are going to utilize all of our available resources to maximum advantage for the undergraduates who are members of the College at the present time and in such a way that in the future, looking back, they shall feel that those who instructed them and those who had the responsibility of the administration of the College did the most that could be done under the circumstances for the enhancement of their prospects in life after the war. And I want to emphasize that matter of life after the war. I don't lack the faith and I don't think that any man in this room lacks the faith as to the outcome of the war. That outcome may be soon or it may be late; probably, as a matter of fact, it will be somewhere between the two extremes of thought—those who believe that there will be a sudden collapse and those who believe that the war is going on for decades. But whatever be that result, the fact remains that the effects of the war are going to last through your generation and the generation of men who come after you. And the careful, scientific, efficient thinking of men who have laid a foundation of knowledge is going to be required if those post-war conditions are to be met, as they needs must be met if the welfare of the country is to be preserved.

It's a difficult thing at a time like this to differentiate between the immediate need and the eventual need. Mr. Churchill unquestionably was right in his statement that our first responsibility is to survive. There can be no question in regard to that. But in surviving, we do not want to survive in such a way that we shall be incapable of meeting the deluge of post-war problems which will be the kind of problems that the liberal college is particularly qualified to prepare men to meet. It is with that thought in mind that the College continues its work; it is with that thought in mind that with all due deference to other needs, we argue the need of the country, even at the present time, for the kind of thinking which is cultivated and which becomes ingrained in men who accept the privileges of the liberal college. Of course, there is nothing more difficult for men than rechanneling their thoughts. That's the difficulty that we are undergoing throughout the whole country at the present time—the difficulty in shifting from a peace economy to a war economy, the difficulty in shifting from the conditions of a nation which expected to be at peace and now finds itself at war, the difficulties attaching to an entirely different kind of a world in which inevitably we are going to live.

But in re-channeling our thoughts, as we must, let us avoid moroseness, let us avoid melancholy, let us avoid pessimism. As a matter of fact, so far as civilization is concerned, it probably is undergoing the greatest hazard of all time right now, but so far as the individual man is concerned, there is nothing that he can hazard more than his life, and individual men have hazarded that time and time again, and men in this College have. When a group of students say to me that no undergraduate body was ever under the burden of responsibility and under the shadow of tragedy that this undergraduate body is, as was said to me the other day, I want immediately to file a dissent. There is no individual in this college at the present time who has reason for the apprehension that residents of this community have had in times past. I was thinking in the chapel service last night of those less-than-a-hundred settlers in the Plymouth Colony on the first Christmas, without enough food for more than a few months, with no help in sight, no succor available to them within any reasonable time in the future, surrounded by hostile Indians of whom they were afraid, with disease rampant among them, and without protection against the hardships of winter. There are very few of us who have ever been called upon to meet anything like that.

I have referred before to some of the letters which I have seen written by Dartmouth men preliminary to the Civil War, letters written by men who were trying to discover what should be their attitude in the coming conflict, men who were in divided homes, men who believed one thing while their parents believed another, men who had brothers going into the war on the side of the South while they were going into it for the North, men who thought they foresaw complete disaster and complete collapse of the Union. There is no reason for us to be tragic and to allow our energies to be sapped by a spirit of melancholy when we think of our own condition, or of any possible condition, as compared with those existent in many of the subjugated countries of Europe.

It isn't entirely a world of sorrow and it isn't necessary to throw away all the keys to happiness in order to wage a war successfully. It's a peculiar thing about psychology that I don't understand, and I don't know whether the psychologists do or not, that men love to be participants in a tragedy or observers of it if it doesn't hit them too hard. We have a phrase here in northern New England which you who are native will understand: "enjoying ill health." Well, now, let's not take that attitude. During the World War, at one period I knew something about the censorship of soldiers' letters as an associate in the office of the Secretary of War, and we found that the letters in which soldiers wrote about wading up to their knees in blood and being bumped into by dead Germans every time they went out anywhere, almost invariably were written by men three, four or five hundred miles back of the front line. And the letters from men in the front lines gave no information whatsoever about anything excepting their own attitude and their own determination.

The mind of man is resilient enough to accept the impositions of tragedy when it gets near enough to him, but when we are as far away from it as we are at the present time, it's very easy to get reflections upon it that sap our vitality to an extent that may become fatal to accomplishment. Now, I don't argue for a moment that it is a pleasant prospect before us in comparison with what would be the prospect of a peaceful world. But I do argue that we have a chance to be participants in one of the greatest crises in history and that we have the chance, if we accept that chance advisedly and intelligently, to be helpful in preserving the finer things in our civilization, as against philosophies which would destroy all of these.

And if I may be just a little flippant, I want to close with a reference to a cartoon which probably many of you have seen, which appeared in the New York HeraldTribune a week ago Monday, I think. Webster's "Timid Soul," Mr. Milquetoast, stood in front of a great billboard on which was emblazoned in great letters "Safety First" and he said, "Wonderful! My! I could stand here and look at that sign all day." That's perfectly understandable, gentlemen. It's an attitude that on the whole seems very attractive to me at the present time. We have had peace, we have had safety. We know what it is to stand in front of the billboard and not even speculate on the necessity of considering anything else, but safety is out for the time being and in order that safety shall be preserved for the world for future generations, and that again sometime we shall have the benefits of peace and prosperity, it is necessary at the present time that we think carefully and that we think responsibly.

HISTORIC COLLEGE CONVOCATION President Hopkins, surrounded by the faculty on the stage of Webster Hall, shown leading the special convocation at which announcement was made of the war plan to accelerate the college year and hold Commencement on May 10.