THE VETERAN RETURNS
He Brings to the Campus Maturity and a Definite Goal
NOVEMBER 2, 1945 will always be known in the history of Dartmouth as a momentous day. In accordance with the current fashion of abbreviation, it might be called V-R Day, Veterans' Registration Day. For on that day some two hundred and eighty soldiers, the first to return to the College since peace was declared, resumed their interrupted education.
The registration took place in the Gymnasium, which has for the last four years served largely the purposes of war. The significance of the occasion was not in the number registering; larger numbers returned at one time after World War I, and much larger numbers still will come in on the flood expected for March 1. But the occasion was full of import, for never before in the history of the College had there been an entering group of students who had shared a collective experience of such epic proportions.
Although these majors, captains, lieutenants, and privates first class are much older in the aggregate than normal college men, they carry their years well. It is only when you talk with them individually that you discover their maturity, the attitude of the grown man as contrasted with the attitude of youth. In general, they desire an education rather than a degree; they spend hours in consultation on their programs and in choosing their courses; they request faculty advice rather then avoid it. Above all, they are eager to find a specific objective; they wish to tie to something tangible, which offers security to themselves and to their families.
The statistics of the educational objectives of the men who registered support this view—the professional schools lead by a long interval. These educational objectives on a percentage basis for returning Dartmouth men and men from the Dartmouth Naval Unit are: 32% business administration; 11% law; 10% medicine; 7% teaching; 6% foreign service, either in the diplomatic service for the government or as foreign representatives of business; 4% writing and journalism; 2% engineering; 2% the Tuck-Thayer combination of business and engineering; 9% social science; 3% science and mathematics; 1 % architecture; 1% personnel relations; 1% movie production; 3% the College degree (defiantly realistic); 3% graduate school; and 5% undecided.
An examination of these percentages shows some significant trends in local veteran thinking: the abiding confidence in American business in the postwar world; the great interest in professional schools contrasted with the minuscule devotion to studies in what might be called the graduate faculty of arts and sciences; the current avoidance of certain sciences as a reaction to the concentration upon them enforced by the war effort. The great revival of the humanities, so widely pre- dieted, is not in evidence in this group. However, these statistical percentages may be radically changed by later veteran enrollment and they do not necessarily fore- cast what will be the interests of a world further removed from the actual heat of battle.
The Special Committee on Academic Adjustments has greatly relaxed the requirements of the curriculum for returning men who were formerly in the College. This relaxation, so counter to the significant and nationwide trend to greater prescription in college curricula, has no ideological implications. The sole object is practical—to make it easier for men to take advantage of revised plans or changed intellectual interests. The veterans have developed new curiosities, have outgrown old enthusiasms, have turned their minds into different channels. To meet the demands of these men, now older and more mature, the greatest possible flexibility consistent with genuine educational values has been accorded to them.
Complementary of this freedom an expanded advisory service has been instituted. The Personnel Bureau and the Testing Committee Office are jointly conducting a vocational and testing service, to which veterans in increasing numbers will undoubtedly resort. A Referral Blank has been distributed for the use of teachers and administrative officers in case they find a student in need of occupational information, or testing, or counseling. The veteran is referred to the proper office, and gets competent testing or advice.
Many men are entirely at sea as to what vocation they should follow; others again are curious to discover their potentialities in various fields. Sensible of these attitudes the Committee—which is strongly convinced of the value of testing combined with sane and competent interpretation and guidance—invited the November veterans to take the Strong Vocational Interest Inventory on a fixed date. Some thirty veterans appeared, a good beginning. The voluntary approach was chosen rather than a universal requirement in the hope that the interest in exploring capabilities and aptitudes would grow from within.
Again, as a step in fostering decentralized personnel activity, the Committee has distributed to the members of the teaching staff data about the veterans, such as service and rank or rate; months in service; time spent in foreign service; married or single; how recently a man was discharged; and how many terms a man still needs for his degree. Each one of these items furnishes a basis for understanding or a springboard for conversation and good fellowship.
The special problems of mental adjustment presented by veterans, so widely featured by the press, are practically non. existent. Men fresh from duty do complain of difficulty of getting down to work; but this difficulty passes off in two or three weeks, and, on the whole, the academic record of the ex-servicemen is above average. As to neurotics, Mr. Hopkins' reply to an alumnus that "they (the returning veterans) seem more normal than they were when they went away" is confirmed daily by the great numbers who consult the Committee's representatives. Never has there been, in the writer's opinion a better balanced or more reasonable, friendly, and cooperative group. The neuro-psychiatrics on the campus will be found rather among the members of the Committee involved in the evaluation of military education in terms of academic credit or among the officers responsible for finding living quarters for married veterans. The horrendous psychical disasters which were supposed to follow the loss of caste when young captains and lieutenants were reduced to non-commissioned citizens have also not materialized. On the contrary, a reaction from spit and polish seems to threaten a return to the sweat shirt era.
Important as this registration was in putting to the test long studied techniques, it will probably prove only a curtain raiser to those of March and there- after. Demobilization up to the present has not affected in general our students, but rather the older men and the mentally and physically handicapped. Furthermore, while the war lasted, lucrative jobs and patriotism siphoned off a large number of potential registrants. But as the discharge age is lowered and the great mass of college men is released the campuses will be crowded. The amount of mail pouring into Parkhurst Hall gives ample evidence that Hanover Plain will not be an uninhabited wilderness.
THE returned veterans about whom Professor Messer has written in the foregoing article are a sizable group this term. When registration for the winter semester was finally closed down on November 19, two weeks after classes had actually started, the number of veterans newly enrolled as civilian undergraduates was 317. This figure breaks down into 165 men who had matriculated at Dartmouth before entering military service, 95 men who first came to Dartmouth as members of the Navy V-12 Unit and have now returned in a civilian status, 41 veterans just starting their college courses as freshmen, and 16 transfer students from other colleges. Names of former students enrolled this term will be found listed, by classes, in the class-notes section of this issue.
About 45 per cent of the Dartmouth men back were commissioned officers, it was shown by the registration cards of the first 222 men, including former members of the V-12 Unit. Their ages ranged from 19 to 30, with the avera8e 22-6 years- They were distributed by classes as follows: seniors, 31%; juniors, 38%; sophomores, 28%; and freshmen, 3%. The Army led the services with 115 men, followed by the Navy with 72, the Marines with 27, other branches with 7. A startling figure compiled by Professor Messer's office was 590 years as the total service of the group, with foreign service 0f 151 years reported by 130 of the 222 men. The average length of service was 32 months, of foreign service 14 months. Sixty months, reported by two men, was the longest individual term of service for the group.
Practically all of these men have had their return to Dartmouth smoothly and intelligently facilitated by the Special Committee on Academic Adjustments, of which Professor Messer is the chairman and the indefatigable workhorse. Through voluminous correspondence and personal interviews each veteran has been treated as an individual case, and, as Professor Messer has written above, the Committee's grant of authority from the Dartmouth Trustees is such as to permit it to make very flexible arrangements within the general academic framework of the College. The Committee's right-hand man is Davis Jackson '36, former Adviser to Fraternities, who has returned from service with the U. S. Navy to fill the post of assistant to Dean Neidlinger, with special duties related to the admission and readmission of veterans. The offices of Dean Neidlinger and Dean Strong are, of course, involved up to the hilt in veterans' matters, and at the special registration in the gymnasium early in November, the Registrar's office found it necessary to be even more flexible than the programs under which some of the pilots, Naval Reserve officers, infantry G.I.'s and bluejackets have again taken up their college work.
In the northeast corner of Parkhurst Hall basement, in the string of little offices which younger alumni will rfemember as the places where they met with class advisers, Professor Messer, Mr. Jackson and a small secretarial staff hold forth as (he full-time operatives of the Special Committee on Academic Adjustments. A steady stream of uniformed callers flows t0 this spot, dammed up usually in the lobby outside. With an ever-increasing number of veterans writing in or arriving tn person to inquire about the procedures and chances for readmission or admission, the general picture is something like that a million-dollar business being carried otl in the confines of the Tanzi Fruit Store (which perhaps the Tanzis could swing, but not the College). More spacious working quarters for the Committee are a prune necessity in view of the accelerating return of veterans, and a likely solution Well be the partitioning of the large Facculty Room into a number of temporary offices. This move up to the presidential floor of the Administration Building will in all probability include the Admissions Office, which is having a boom of its own, with boys and parents calling in large numbers, and with inquiries about admission pouring in at the rate of about 400 letters a week, many of them from veterans desirous of coming to Dartmouth under the provisions of the G.I. Bill.
The whole admissions problem for the present and immediate future is one of the most difficult facing the College. Dean
Strong has promised to write something about this for an early issue of the MAGAZINE, but a quick idea may be obtained from the fact that some 3,000 Dartmouth undergraduates interrupted their college studies for war service, nearly 5,000 military students completed varying amounts of work here toward their degrees, the number of applicants for the regular freshman class has returned to its pre-war level, and hundreds of applications from veterans as prospective freshmen or transfers continue to come in. The College has not changed its conviction that 2500 is the maximum number of students which it can adequately instruct, house, feed and otherwise accommodate; and the squaring of the demand with the available space and facilities poses a nice problem in academic logistics.
Meanwhile, whatever the problems relating to their fellow servicemen, the veterans already on the campus are settling down to work and are making their presence felt in a variety of ways. Honorable discharge buttons grace many a lapel, but far more conspicuous evidence of past military service is provided by the conglomerate civilian-Army outfits which the men have adopted for campus wear. In the classroom and the dormitory bull-session the veteran is much more of an influence than he was last term, when only about forty discharged servicemen were enrolled as civilian undergraduates. Next March, when perhaps as many as a thousand veterans will be enrolled in the College, he will very definitely dominate things and set the tone of campus life.
Since the start of the winter term on November 5 the campus has been titillated by the presence of 50 wives who accompanied their veteran husbands back to Hanover. The transformation of Fayer- weather and South Fayerweather Halls into an island of domesticity in the midst of masculine Dartmouth has been taken quite in stride, but students still marvel at the fancy ruffled curtains and potted plants to be seen in the windows, at the makeshift iceboxes rigged up on the outer window sills pending the arrival of the kitchenette units, and at the happy couples leaving and entering the dorms at any hour of the day or night. The arrangement apparently looks pretty good to the rest of the students, for several have been in to tell College officers that they are thinking of accelerating their plans for marriage and would like to get Fayerweather suites next term. Unfortunately, the College cannot promise these quarters to such men, for the demand for living accommodations for married veterans in March will be greatly increased and some sort of priority system, not yet settled, will have to be devised'. To supplement the two dormitories and off-campus apartments assigned to married veterans, the College has already begun work on "Sachem Village," former site of the Lebanon Street tennis courts, where approximately fifty small, prefabricated houses will be erected in time (it is hoped) for the March term. More details about this development will be found in the News ofthe College section.
One might suppose that the students' wives were leading a rather subdued existence while their husbands attended classes by day and studied by night, but many of them have obtained employment with the College as secretaries and office assistants, and for all the wives the initial requirement of furnishing their apartments and setting up housekeeping has been a challenge. The results uniformly indicate that the Dartmouth wives are a resourceful lot. The Fayerweather suites have been made cozy and attractive, and even without kitchenette units the wives manage to produce breakfast and some other meals Fayerweather Hall, for example, has the air of an apartment house rather than of a dormitory, and if anyone has any doubts about the advantages of wives in the dormitories, he has only to make a telephone call to Middle Fayer and get a prompt and cheerful answer.
Under the direction of Warner Bentley graduate manager of the Council on Student Organizations, and Mrs. Broderick house mother of the Hostess House, the College has held a tea for the veterans' wives and is undertaking to arrange a program of activities for them. One proposal likely to be carried through is a series of informal lectures or classes by members of the faculty, especially since the College has ruled that wives may not attend the regular Dartmouth classes.
Whatever the novel aspects of the return of married veterans, no one seems to have forgotten that the main object of being here is education, and this is true of the entire veterans group, for whom Professor Messer has expressed admiration. It is not surprising that these men are setting an example of hard work and accomplishment for the rest of the undergraduates. Dartmouth is glad and proud to have them all back "within her classic halls," and reconversion objective No. 1 is to meet their special needs—even to the extent of digging up the tennis courts and creating a prefabricated village.
C. E. W.
Two NOVEL ASPECTS OF THE VETERANS' RETURN to Dartmouth are (left) the service outfits still worn for casual campus attire and (right) the married couples now occupying Fayerweather and South Fayerweather Halls. Air Corps jackets are seen most and will come in handiest for the cold months ahead. Shown at the fight are Mr. and Mrs. Bynum E. Hinton Jr. '42 and Mr. and Mrs. Robert K. Sehoonmaker '42 in the Hintons' homey Fayerweather Hall apartment.
Two NOVEL ASPECTS OF THE VETERANS' RETURN to Dartmouth are (left) the service outfits still worn for casual campus attire and (right) the married couples now occupying Fayerweather and South Fayerweather Halls. Air Corps jackets are seen most and will come in handiest for the cold months ahead. Shown at the fight are Mr. and Mrs. Bynum E. Hinton Jr. '42 and Mr. and Mrs. Robert K. Sehoonmaker '42 in the Hintons' homey Fayerweather Hall apartment.
SPECIAL REGISTRATION FOR RETURNING VETERANS took place in the gymnasium on November 2, when more than 200 men in this group went through the process of arranging courses and otherwise getting started anew in the Dartmouth careers which were interrupted, by the outbreak of war.
A NEW WRINKLE WAS ADDED to the registration process by this table set up by the Veterans Administration. Representatives from Manchester gathered from the veterans information about their service records, letters of eligibility and other data necessary for clearing the way for government financial help under the G.I. Bill. More than 300 veterans are now studying at Dartmouth under the Bill's provisions.
PROFESSOR MESSER, AUTHOR of this month's lead article and chairman of the Special Committee on Academic Adjustments, shown giving some on-the-spot help to one of the veterans registering at the gymnasium. He is giving full time to this special work this term.
MATRICULATION WAS ALSO DIFFERENT this year with veterans wearing discharge buttons well represented among the incoming freshmen. Dean Strong (left) and Executive Officer Dickerson are shown giving the matriculants the proper certificates before President Dickey officially made them Dartmouth men.
ALL THE COMFORTS OF HOME AND COLLEGE TOO. The Schoonmakers, shown also on Page 11, demon- strate a Fayerweather domestic idyll as he does the next day's assignment and she catches up on the family darning. Mrs. Schoonmaker is one of the veterans' wives now working for the College.
CHAIRMAN, SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON ACADEMIC ADJUSTMENTS
