The Undergraduate Chair

New Attitude of Belonging Seen in V-12 Men as November Term Begins With Old Dartmouth Spirit Still Paramount

COMING BACK TO HANOVER this month for Dartmouth's second semester of operation under the Navy V-12 Program was very different from our return four months ago. The shocks and surprises of rapid change were missing; it was clear that the College had adjusted to new events and institutions and had settled down once more. The labors of creation and transition for the Navy and for Dartmouth were done with, and now everyone could look forward to seeing our job well done, with more confidence than we may have had last spring.

We started classes on a good cold day, with the sky looking as if there might be snow. Men in Navy blue probably heard some of the same jokes that others had heard in past years. If the freshmen could not be recognized by the traditional green pot-hats, the civilian style creases in their bell-bottomed trousers and what is known as "that freshman look," which even military status can never change, left them easily identifiable. There were no upperclass trunks for them to worry up and down dormitory stair-wells, but when we saw them staggering back from small stores with loads of equipment, we knew they were doing their share.

Attitudes in the College were somewhat near to what some men during the past years thought they should have been. Several hundred men had left Hanover two weeks before to complete the final stages of their military training before going to sea or out with the Marines. Men we knew were on all the fighting fronts, we already had reports of some of them dying, and we had to be more serious than we were a year ago. We had to know what we were doing and where we were going.

The beginning of this new semester recalled a wandering bull-session I sat in on last winter. It was one of those things that digresses by illogical stages from ski wax to women and then to more serious matters. The newspapers had just announced the plans for the armed services college programs and most of us were pretty sure that Hanover would "go Navy" as long as the war lasted. We had an argument that lasted until hours that are today unheard of here.

Some of the men thought that once we went military, there would be nothing left of the old school, that the spirit was dying and could only get worse. I guess they didn't mean to, but they gave the impression that once cars, alcohol, and houseparties disappeared from Hanover Plain, nothing would be left. It was their opinl0n that we should all leave as soon as possible, rather than witness an agonizing downfall. But there were others who felt that if

the Dartmouth spirit was anything more than a hollow anachronism, it would last as long as the College stayed open and would serve all who came here to study. If any of the values which were nurtured in our school had any depth or meaning, they would survive.

It's hard to write or talk about these things we commonly refer to as the "intangibles" because they are so deep within us that they will not suffer to be hauled out and given names and printed down on paper. Maybe it's enough to know that they exist, and watch them work, as we did in Hanover this summer. They are the best and most important things about Dartmouth and they did survive with a miraculous ease that might have rassed last winter's pessimists. What happened in Hanover this summer proved that what we call the Dartmouth spirit was more than something you sing about to make yourself feel good.

There were over a thousand men here who had come to Dartmouth because they were sent here. It was tough on the V-12 freshmen who arrived with a sort of negative, defensive attitude. They didn't know what the college was like, they knew that they hadn't come here in the usual way, and most of them were pretty sure that they could never "belong." They wanted their stay here to be more than a trip to a military camp, but as far as most of them could see, it would have to be little more than just that. In addition to entering freshmen, there was the larger group of men who came from other colleges. Most of them had been in school long enough to know what college was about. They had left behind familiar friends and familiar places. Most of them seemed to feel when they arrived that Dartmouth was just a place they were passing through, like a railroad station, to be given only as much attention and left with as little regret.

Those attitudes have changed. In a large part the change came about because the spirit that met us when we came to Hanover as freshmen in the regular classes was not kept from those who came here as strangers. Dartmouth men did not fall to the kind of facile snobbery to which the contradiction of the traditional process of admission might have led. They proved that the fellowship they had known was more than narrow cliquishness. It was something all of us had seen as freshmen during those bewildering September days.

The men who had been here before wanted to know you and wanted to like you. They were ready to judge a man for what they saw him to be. You remember feeling at home as soon as the upperclassmen arrived, despite the aforementioned trunk-lugging, furniture moving, and sundry wearisome tasks. You wrote home after a week that the place was full of "good embarguys." The same spirit met the men who came here Oil July 1, and those of them who left at the end of the summer, or who came back to start the new semester, knew why we felt about Dartmouth as we did. They knew because they could feel the same way themselves.

Had our spirit gone no deeper than an amused tolerance for the long week end and gentlemen's grades, there would have been no change of attitude, and things might not have gone well.

The best of what we have here will survive the passing of an era in the life of the College. Most of us are agreed that no nation can come out of the war exactly as it was when the war began. We cannot be so provincial when thinking about the College as to expect it to become what it was in the years before the war. But most people here do expect that the changes which will occur in the nation and in the College will be for the good. This summer's events have shown that last winter's gloomy speculators were all wrong. Those things which carried us through the small tests will do the same in the big ones still to come.

PRESIDENT HOPKINS ADDRESSING CIVILIAN UNDERGRADUATES AT SING OUT

New Editor The editors take pleasure in welcoming to the staff this month Apprentice Seaman Robert B. Hodes '46 of the Dartmouth V-12 Unit, who has assumed the post of Undergraduate Editor. He is Feature Editor of the weekly Dartmouth Log and before entering the V-12 program was elected to the literary staff of Jack-o-Lantern. Hodes comes from Brooklyn, N. Y., and is a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School. He takes over The Undergraduate Chair from George H. Tilton 111 '44, USNR, who completed the V-12 course in October.