President Explains Navy Relations
At a recent meeting of the Dartmouth Alumni Association of Manchester, President Hopkins explained the relationship between the College and the Naval Training School at Dartmouth with reference, mainly, to the financial aspects of the arrangement. The complete text of the President's statement follows.'—-Ed.
I AM CONSTANTLY ASKED in regard to the relations between the College and the Naval unit stationed at Dartmouth in tones that would seem to indicate that there has been some doubt about them. The fact is that they have been exceedingly pleasant. The officers in charge of the unit, without foregoing claim to any of the rights and privileges due their school under the Government contract, have nevertheless likewise been considerate of College interests wherever possible friction might have arisen. The personnel making up the membership of the school in the three sessions which have been held has been an exceptionally high grade group of mature, seriously minded men seeking the earliest possible fitness, mental and physical, for needful service.
The college community on its part has been happy to have these student officers offered the hospitality of the College and in spite of the reserve which normally attaches to a northcountry community has, I think, made evident to some degree at least to staff and student officers alike in the Naval School the cordiality which it feels and its appreciation as American citizens for the service which they are preparing to give.
There is in this connection, however, one very great misapprehension, not only within the Hanover community but outside, that ought to be corrected; namely, that there is any financial profit to the College in the presence of the school within its halls. The College service was not proffered to the Government in the beginning with any expectation of profit, and if there had been such expectation, the capable officers of the Navy who have negotiated the contracts would have speedily dispelled this. The actual cost to the College in the overhead expense of maintaining this portion of its plant and of affording its facilities is in large part met, and to the extent that any of the buildings would have stood idle and unoccupied without the presence of the school, there is financial advantage to the College in having this unit stationed in Hanover. In other words, if avoiding heavy losses on that portion of the plant utilized by the school be considered a profit, the College may be said to profit to that extent. Moreover, in regard to the query concerning who assumes the expense of alterations or of additional equipment necessary to the use of the Naval School, the answer is that the Government does in large part.
In regard to board, we are not entirely free from the questions which always seem to arise wherever it becomes necessary to feed men in the mass. In the crowded quarters of the College Hall dining rooms and under the necessity of speedy service, it is not possible to give the complete satisfaction to men who have come from private homes that they have found in home cooking and menus devised for individual tastes. To men who come from communities where provisions have been of less cost and economies could be practised according to individual appetites, the cost of $9.00 a week which is charged to their personal account perhaps seems high, but to the College, on the other hand, with the increasing difficulties of getting food and with the complications of maintaining its organization, there not only is no probability of profit in the rate at which food is offered, but on the contrary there is no inconsiderable possibility of loss.
Through long years of experience and in repeated comparisons between what is offered at Dartmouth at its price and what is offered at other institutions at their respective prices in the way of board, we are confident in regard to the efficiency of our organization at this point and in regard to its capacity to give maximum value in the way of board at the minimum of price. There are problems and difficulties, such as those involved in giving up the use of College Hall simultaneously with the closing of many of the other restaurants and clubs in the town and thus throwing a continuously heavier burden upon the College plant, that would not be willingly undertaken by the College excepting for the service which it is endeavoring to render in connection with the maintenance of the Naval School.
I go somewhat into detail in regard to this whole question of the presence of the school in Hanover because on the one hand we are so happy to have it there while on the other hand those who give financial support to the College ought not to have misapprehension in regard to the significance of its presence financially.
The well-considered policy of the Trustees to maintain the reputation of the College in all past wars and crises since its foundation and to offer the educational facilities of a liberal arts college so long as there are any students available to undertake this type of education at Dartmouth requires that we shall maintain something much more than a skeleton force of the faculty and that we shall accept the financial implications of this. We hold this, moreover, to be a moral obligation to our men in service. Fifty per cent of our annual expenditure is for faculty salaries. With the going into service of more than seventy of our faculty members, some minor portion of this expense disappears, but a relatively small proportion of the whole. The Naval unit is a wholly self-contained school and provides its own instruction from Naval personnel. There is, therefore, no offset at this point to the returns (more than four hundred thousand dollars) that would be received from a thousand undergraduates, were they available, -to apply against the expense of instruction necessary for Dartmouth as a college of liberal arts.
As I have said before, the Administration and the Trustees are in complete agreement that regardless of cost, the College shall not abandon its primary function. Such a de- cision, as a matter of fact, is not only necessary that we may prove as self-confident and as courageous as our predecessors have been in other times of crisis but it is likewise necessary on grounds of just average intelligence that in the end it would be far more expensive to allow a carefully selected organization such as is the faculty to become entirely disrupted and dissipated, thus forcing upon the College the setting up of an entirely new organization at the end of the two, three, or four years which shall lapse before normal procedure can again be undertaken.
While on this question of College finance, there is another matter upon which I should like to speak. It is our habit in talking with members of the Dartmouth alumni to put all of our cards upon the table. The Treasurer makes accounting as plain and as definite as this can be done in his annual Report and we like to feel that any information which we have here in Hanover is likewise available to any member of the Dartmouth family. Nevertheless, the very definiteness and accuracy of our accounting system is likely to lead to a misconception in regard to our financial situation, taken on the basis of any one year in such an unsettled period as the present. We are in a period of rapidly decreasing returns financially but we cannot manipulate the financial year to synchronize it with the manipulations of our academic year under the accelerated program. As we speed up the educational program we collect in 1942-1943 a portion of the receipts which would normally attach to the inevitably lean year of 1943-1944, thus to some extent ameliorating losses this year but at the expense of the already foredoomed poverty of the next year.
It is a little difficult to go into the involved figures necessary to make clear what I wish to explain but in brief, this is the situation—that owing to the liberal policy hitherto existent of the. armed services in accepting men into the reserves and allowing them to continue on their college course for a time, the inevitable decrease in enrollment which eventually will impose so heavy a financial burden upon the privately endowed college will not have made its major impact until the next financial year.
Anticipating that if the College were to be in session during the summer some considerable proportion of our enrollment might wish to utilize it on the basis of an accelerated program, we adopted such a program a year ago last December and, put it into effect immediately. One aspect of this action that needs to be considered for full understanding of the financial bearing of this policy is that w:e are not in as desperate a financial plight this year as we had anticipated, though reducing the draft age to eighteen will place us in a far more desperate situation for the next financial year. So we have salvaged at least one year from the extreme deficits which otherwise might have been incurred. But for the succeeding year backlogs more extensive than ever before conceived will be indispensable.
On the contrary, I wish to make a second point in connection with the statement that the assumption by some is false that financially we will be on easy street because of our accelerated program, in which we include three terms in the financial year as against the conventional two. Let's look at these figures for a minute. The average enrollment in the undergraduate college per semester for the last five years has been 2,288. We have thus received tuition payments from 2,288 undergraduates a semester or 4,576 tuition payments per year. For the three-term year of the accelerated program—including 211 freshmen who only paid 60% of their tuitions for the restricted course of the summer session—the college enrollment for 1942-1943 represents 4,514 semester tuitions. In other words, in spite of the accelerated program and in spite of the extra expense which has attached to that, the total enrollment for the three semesters has been some little less than the total enrollment under ordinary circumstances for two semesters.
I submit these figures in reply to those who have jumped at the conclusion that the College income must have been considerably enhanced by going on to the three-year term. Actually, as will be seen, in spite of some considerably increased cost of the accelerated program, the income per year from student tuitions is considerably less, which simply means that College income has been less while expense has necessarily been greater.
