The Undergraduate Chair
Students Face Important Decisions In Accepting "College on a New Basis"
TONIGHT I FIND MYSELF AGAIN writing in The Dartmouth office on the 13th of the month, on a very sharp, bright, cold night, with a clean new moon, with old, hard snow on the ground, and with a more decisive campus atmosphere for the elements to affect. Occum Pond is filled in the afternoons and evenings with skaters- hockey players in the four rinks that are erected on the ice, figure skaters on the clean-scraped area near the Outing Club House, and the speed skaters down near the other end of the pond, leaning into the turns, their skates making a sharp zing on the ice as they pick up speed.
The Oak Hill ski tow has been running daily since the College reconvened last Tuesday, and the slopes on the golf course near the Club House are hard-packed now, with skiers there every day.
And class-rooms are filled in the last week of classes, the library gets jammed in the evenings with people studying for the exams that start this Saturday, and the Nugget gets filled for good pictures like "All that Money Can Buy," the Stephen Vincent Benet story The Devil and DanielWebster put into a movie that packed the theater for both shows last Sunday night.
The student body is back, largely intact, with less people missing than many might have expected, and with more people going as the time moves along. Perhaps I'd be justified in saying that now the students know what they're about; certainly much of the activity, routine and "business as usual" as it seems, is actually the College on a new basis for a lot of the students.
It's College on a new basis for those who have enlisted and been accepted by the Naval Reserve for entrance into service at the close of the College in May; they're sure now of what they have to do for the remainder of the year. So they're going about the old routines of class-rooms and the Nugget and skiing and skating and holding bull-sessions and playing bridge and studying for the mid-year finals with a new and more definite feeling than they had before the holidays.
And it's College on a new basis for those seniors who have been drafted or who have enlisted for training in the army or air corps and who have their last thirty days of Dartmouth College in which to wind up three and a half years of living with the College—thirty days of intensive study for special comprehensive examinations and then off for training.
But it's not College on a new or on any kind of very real basis for the parts of the student body that find a surface fascination in talking- about physical exams and military requirements, while finding an equal and opposite fascination in staying out of recruiting offices. How many they are it's hard to say, but the "parlor militarists" (as The Dartmouth called them in an editorial last week) make up the amorphous group that now finds real interest in toying with the implements of decision, but that finds no real desire to form a definite decision in action.
Their voices are heard in the restaurants and dining halls in earnest discussion about such absorbing technicalities as 20/20 vision and Schneider tests and training periods. Their action as yet has been quietly non-existent. If they're making up their minds while keeping active within the limits of the College, then their words can, be accepted on equal terms with all interesting conversation on campus these days. But if, as there seems reason to believe, they're finding shelter from the academic requirements in being indecisively vocal about enlistment, then their words are as dead and powerless as their presence on campus.
The "parlor militarist" class on campus is by no means large enough to warrant the belief that present campus activity is only "business as usual"; I think the majority of the campus is either pledged or on the way to being pledged to some kind of definite place in the war effort of the nation. The activity of the College is sufficiently healthy and alive, in a new sense of being individually and collectively a product of decision, to keep the College alive and involved in the war at the same time that its man-power is being tapped by draft boards and enlistment.
But it's still up to those in the College, both decided and undecided about their place in the military services, as individuals, to keep Dartmouth College as directly involved in' the war effort as it at present seems, and much more than it at present seems, if the College is to serve as all institutions and individuals must serve in a nation at war.
At present the ways that the College can serve are being speeded up, and the danger in the speed-up is in the mechanization of learning and doing. The values of Dartmouth's own kind of education the values of personal strength and decision gained through constant working against encrusted complacencies and compromisescan be too easily lost, and will be too easily lost, if the means and techniques of a rapid educational process are given emphasis over the content and conflict of the materials in the thought and action of the College.
Right now, while some seniors are busy trying to make sense out of a crammed thirty days of preparation for comprehensive examinations in their major subject (supposedly covering the work of the semester they're going to miss as well as the three semesters they've completed), the technique of granting a degree for work hastily digested and supposedly assimilated outruns the sense of the content of the work covered.
GRADES AND EXAMS LOSE POINT
There's little sense in academic distinctions like grades and examinations for a man who's waiting to start training for thservice; the education doesn't lie in the degree or in the comprehensive exams, but in the individual and personal learning and judgment and ability that have come, not through the techniques alone, but through the combined learning and application and conflict and integration of work honestly undertaken and honestly carried on. As one professor said to me today, the only thing that speeded comprehensives prove for drafted or enlisted seniors at this time is "awkward."
But what the College is to do in the situation is more difficult to say than it is to analyze the faults of the hurried exams. Again, real education—the living kind tied up in the integral life of the College must be compromised with certain seemingly unrelated standards if the process is to be "respectable" and degrees are to be granted. And the seniors will make the best kind of learning that they can of the rushed curriculum, it must be hoped.
For those not yet called the education of the College must continue to live in the organic life of the Dartmouth community in the life that has always been and must continue to be outside the artificial limits of glorified techniques and mechanics. And it must still and always be for the individuals in the College students and faculty and administration alike to make individual and collective sense beyond the dry meaning of official rulings and deadened standards.
Perhaps, if I'd become accustomed to divining future events by comparatively insignificant coincidences, I'd have found it providential that three days ago I ran out of my personal stationery with 303 College Hall, Hanover, N. H. on it and that right now I'm writing my copy for the Undergraduate Chair on the last few pages of special copy that the ALUMNI MAGAZINE gave me. Mr. Hayward gave me a ream of the light, orange-colored stuff last spring when I wrote my first column for the MAGAZINE; tonight I have just enough of it left to finish my last column for the MAGAZINE.
But it's hot because I've run out of paper that this is my last column for the MAGAZINE; rather it's because I've enlisted in the Army Air Corps. This morning down in Davis Field House a visiting Air Corps examining board gave its second day of physical exams to men willing to enlist immediately in the service; fourteen men passed today, and I was among them.
So tomorrow I go to Rutland where I take my oath and get my orders to report for training; I'll probably be allowed thirty days furlough to finish my affairs here, to get through the hurried comprehensives, and then maybe a few days at home before reporting for training.
And for those of us who are leaving Dartmouth before Commencement Day there is no more real regret at leaving early what we have lived with and loved than there would be in leaving in May, it seems to me now. The things that have meant the most and that now mean the most are not cut off by leaving the College now.
The relations with men and with groups of men, with buildings and with accustomed ways of living and acting those things that have made up the College for us—will live as long as there are honest men in it, as long as those men will fight and laugh and live in the College, knowing that their own honesty and strength is the honesty and strength of the College. And that's all for now; it's time to leave.
"The theories and formulas of navigation and nautical astronomy are developed"—so states the College Catalogue in describing the Astronomy 11-12 course of Richard H. Goddard '20. The Naval Reserve (V-y) training requires college mathematics and astronomy. Above, at left, Professor Goddard (who also instructs Civil Pilot Training students in aerial navigation) is giving personal help in
a practical navigation laboratory exercise to John BoltonJr. '42 of Andover, Mass., left, and John C. Pritchard '43of New Britain, Conn, (son of R. E. Pritchard '14, formerpresident of the Alumni Council). At right, members of theclass shown in sextant practice, John S. Wyper '42 of WestHartford, Conn., Bolton, William Orr 2nd '44 of EastLongmeadow, Mass., Pritchard, and Professor Goddard.
"The theories and formulas of navigation and nautical astronomy are developed"—so states the College Catalogue in describing the Astronomy 11-12 course of Richard H. Goddard '20. The Naval Reserve (V-y) training requires college mathematics and astronomy. Above, at left, Professor Goddard (who also instructs Civil Pilot Training students in aerial navigation) is giving personal help in
a practical navigation laboratory exercise to John BoltonJr. '42 of Andover, Mass., left, and John C. Pritchard '43of New Britain, Conn, (son of R. E. Pritchard '14, formerpresident of the Alumni Council). At right, members of theclass shown in sextant practice, John S. Wyper'42 of WestHartford, Conn., Bolton, William Orr 2nd '44 of EastLongmeadow, Mass., Pritchard, and Professor Goddard.
WRITES LAST "CHAIR" Craig Kuhn '42 of Pittsburgh, Pa., who hasbrought his undergraduate editorship ofthe MAGAZINE to a close by joining theArmy Air Corps.
