1945 Fund

EARLY RETURNS IN the 3 ist annual Alumni Fund campaign showed a total, as of March 17, of $65,000 from 1,830 contributors. Although the 1945 Fund stood-900 gifts and $5,000 behind the comparable totals on the same date last year, the average gift up to March 17 was-$35.70 compared with $25.60 at the same time in 1944. Of the contributors to date, 248 increased their gifts over last year," against only 73 decreases.

The minimum goal set by the 1945 Fund Committee of the Alumni Council is $300,000, with $235,000 assigned in class objectives and the balance expected from general and special-fund sources. The Committee has decided that income from class memorial funds henceforth will not be included in calculating the percentage of objectives attained by the classes but that some other method will be found to give proper recognition to the total dollars contributed by the outstanding classes.

In another important decision, the Fund Committee has announced that starting with this year's campaign a new measure of alumni participation will replace the old "percentage of contributors" which took the total of graduate and non-graduate gifts and proportioned them against the number of living graduates only. The new basis, called a Participation Index, takes the number of living graduates plus onethird of living non-graduates and figures the percentage of participation (including memorial gifts) from this scoring base. A poll among head class agents disclosed that they were overwhelmingly in favor of dropping the old system which, although it served as a convenient and understandable basis for comparison from year to year, nevertheless did not present a wholly accurate picture of alumni participation and was out of line with alumni fund practices elsewhere. The new Participation Index, based on special Dartmouth factors and on recent percentages of contributions, has been devised as the fairest method of scoring participation of the classes as compared with each other.

A new head agent, Prof. Allen R. Foley '20 of the College's history department, was added recently to the group of class leaders who are the key men in the conduct of the Dartmouth Alumni Fund. Class agents of the Chicago area held their annual dinner meeting in that city on March ai, and the Boston and New York dinners, with President Hopkins as main speaker, are scheduled for April 9 and 10, respectively.