The Undergraduate Chair
Perennial Campus Doings Upon Approach of Spring Fail to Hide Serious Concern with World Conflict
EDITOR'S NOTE: Guest sitter in The Undergraduate Chair this month is Edward J.Rasmussen '42 of Scarsdale, N. Y. Originally a member of the Class of 1941, Rasmussen dropped out of College for a yearto learn about life the hard way, and hasmade his experiences the subject of someof his campus writings since he returned toCollege last year. He is an English honorsstudent, a member of Sigma Alpha Epgilon, and was a member of Green Key andof The Dartmouth directorate. He is thebrother of Harold F. Rasmussen '38.
THE DUCKBOARDS HAVE been out for a week now. Already the ground is dry enough for baseball, and the last few sunny afternoons the Green has come alive with pick-up games.
These are the things that go on year after year, war or no war. They have nothing directly to do with the undergraduate attitude on any immediate issue. Yet the suggestion that because they still go on the students hide away and refuse to face issues is a straw man hardly worth knocking down. Everybody talks and thinks war, worries more about it, probably, than the soldier in the Army camps.
And yet, although it's a long while since Carnival-less Carnival passed us by, some of the undergraduate college is still engaged in making up for it. On week-ends, the streets downtown are confused with girls, and the roads leading away from Hanover carry carloads of students bound for colleges where houseparties are still be- ing held. Some are just doing what they don't yet know people can do without; others are frankly getting away, seeking diversion.
And there are those who are carrying extra loads of courses, some are busy in the gym taking off excess weight or building up muscles, some are seeking aid at the Eye Clinic or Dick's House in overcoming physical deficiencies, all with the idea of qualifying for some necessary branch of the service.
Everybody, even those with the dates or those away on week-ends, wants to face the war. Perhaps they suffer most because they can't make the war seem real enough among these peaceful hills. They all mean business—the nation's business; but some are haunted by the conviction that the nation's business is not what we do here. For this reason, though for some college is a period of intense preparation, for others it has become a barely tolerable period of unjustifiable inaction.
They react in various ways. There is the phenomenon of the increasing 'social importance of week-ends, which at some time or other has seemed to affect everybody, more or less. There have been some who have left college to enlist or volunteer. But as always, most have felt that somehow no final decision need be made yet.
PEARSON PLAN AROUSES CAMPUS
.Most significant individual reaction of the last month was that of Charles "Stubby" Pearson, Senior Fellow and captain of football and basketball. Feeling the College could do what it is doing now and still do more and do it better, he proposed a plan to improve mental and physical preparedness which, on its subsequent appearance in The Dartmouth, became known as the Pearson Plan. As outlined in the February 25th issue of the college daily, the Pearson Plan favored a compulsory physical training program to include all undergraduates in place of the present two-year recreation requirement, and a "no-cut" system, with a margin of three cuts a course per semester, replacing for the duration the present attendance system.
As it became noised about that a plan was being proposed to compel all undergraduates to take exercise, and attend all classes over a three-cut allowance, the immediate student reaction was definite. They didn't like it. The issue of The Dartmouth on the day following was loaded with letters of protest. The gist of many of the letters was they objected to any halfway attempt to make the College an Army camp. Each had its function in war time, and it wasn't necessary to apologize for the liberal arts college by attempting to hybridize it.
A general meeting of the student body was called for the following night. 105 Dartmouth was crowded. By the time the meeting was ready to start, men were sitting in the aisles. Pearson took the platform carrying a catcher's chest protector in one hand and a pistol in the other and faced the hostile crowd to defend his plan.
He smiled and made jokes, and the crowd laughed with him. He read a letter from a Naval officer declaring what hadn't been done twenty years ago to protect the health of this new generation. Then he sat on the desk on the platform and explained that something was going to have to be done about class attendance, something ought to be done about the physical condition of the students, and that he thought the students themselves were the ones to do it. He said casual class attendance wasn't enough in war time, and that he felt the training task of the Army and Navy ought to be simplified by the College's taking some responsibility for putting candidates in good physical condition. He believed that unless the students did it for themselves, it would have to be done for them. He said he had proposed his plan in the hope that student support would be sufficient to accomplish the job independent of external prompting. The so-called plan had not been inspired from above, he said; it was only intended as a skeleton proposal to be amended and added to and worked out by the students.
In the subsequent discussion, little meat was added to the skeleton's bones. As a general proposition, the idea that some sort of compulsory "rec" program ought to be instituted received the standing vote of about half of the audience. The three-cut, no-cut plan was less fortunate. The only tangible result was the promise that Palaeopitus would take a student poll on a proposal definite enough to be presented, if passed, to the Administration.
But there were less explicit results, and they were perhaps the more important. It had become necessary for individuals to clarify their relation to the College, and the College's relation to the Nation, present and future. It had become somewhat more evident that the decisions which had to be made must be made soon.
POLL FAVORS PHYSICAL TRAINING
The Palaeopitus poll was made the following week. In the less than two hours that the polls were open, over 1100 undergraduates, or about half the student body, voted. Fifty-five per cent were in favor of broadening Dartmouth's physical education program, but 83 per cent rejected any revision of the present attendance system. In accordance with the results of the poll. Palaeopitus voted "to recommend to the Administration that a compulsory physical education program be established for the four classes, such a program to be drawn up by joint consultation of the Administration, Recreational Department, and the student body." The senior governing body further defined its position as "in accord with the present cut system," but added that it "fails to sanction the present abuse of the system by the student body." All this meant a lot of thinking and talking, and much slow and sweaty, yet imperceptible, effort in the shaping of attitudes. But as always, when the weather gets warm, and the melting snow mires the center of the campus, the duckboards appear. And as the ground dries, the baseball players appear. Somebody has seen a robin. New young trees have been planted in front of Bartlett. These, in terms of a war, are not the nation's business, and the nation's business now is war. Yet this voting and talking and thinking means business—the nation's business, and that sort of business is being done here.
It is important business. Owen Lattimore was here in the middle of March to give the Guernsey Center Moore Foundation lectures. He spoke three consecutive nights to capacity audiences. Part of what he had to say was about morale—attitudes, aims, motives. He discounted newspaper reports of overwhelming Japanese superiority in men or equipment in their recent successful campaigns. And always his recurrent theme was "How about the Chinese? Have they not had to face superior equipment?" It is demonstrably a fatal mistake, he concluded, to ignore the importance of the factor of morale.
It is hard for a country whose chief concern has been to realize its richness in material resources, whose conception of morale building has been limited to entertainment and diversion, to acknowledge the decisive operation of a spiritual factor.
Yet this country is one of the richest in spiritual resources, if it cares to realize them. Something happens when there are decisions to be made, not just orders to be accepted. Something happened during the debates on the Pearson Plan. Something happened to the audience Lattimore challenged with his talk. And especially something happened when he said, "The world cannot exist half subject, half free; democracy must be good for everybody, or it will survive for nobody," and I heard the echo of something I had heard in a class room a few hours earlier, "Christianity can be realized for nobody until the last non-Christian has been converted."
On a hundred other occasions there will be a hundred other recollections of arguments and self-decisions on what professors have said. Not revelations, or accompanied by flashes of lightning, they may not even seem important, but they add up. Take this and multiply it by thousands of others at liberal colleges throughout the country, and somehow all the talking and thinking and arguing is no longer futile or unjustifiable, no longer seems so far away from the nation's business. The time until graduation no longer stretches out into intolerable suspense. Those few weeks become incredibly precious.
DARTMOUTH MEN IN THE U. S. ARMY SIGNAL CORPS Among the alumni who are training for the Signal Corps is the group above, pictured atFort Monmouth, New Jersey. They have graduated from the Officer Candidate Department with the rank of second lieutenant. First row, left to right, are: Richard J. Herr 40,Clark Denney '31, David L. Fox '36. Second row: Rodger S. Harrison '39, Chester Ray'42, Elbert Camp '36, and Dana Prescott '57. Future work of the new officers ranges frominstruction to candidates and further study at Fort Monmouth to duty in Washington.
Mail to Men in Service THE ALUMNI RECORDS OFFICE, Park- hurst Hall, Hanover, N. H., will be glad to forward first-class mail ad- dressed to Dartmouth men in the serv- ice whose addresses are not known to classmates and other friends who wish to get in touch with them. Because of censorship regulations we are not per- mitted to publish detailed, addresses but the College will forward mail if sent to Hanover as noted above. Men in the service will be glad to hear from friends and we hope many alumni will use this means of getting in touch with them.
