The Road Back

Two straws in the wind indicating that perhaps the College is over the hump in its abnormal, wartime mode of operation and is now feeling the urge to return to some of the old familiar ways are the recent revival of Green Key after a two-year lapse of student government and the reestablishment of Freshman Commons for the civilian students who matriculated this term. The present Commons is only a small-scale model of the former College Hall establishment and one is still nautically aware that it is on the "second deck" of the S. S. Thayer Hall, but the knowledge that the Dartmouth Dining Association is once more feeding the young Indian braves is somehow very satisfying. Green Key, while numerically smaller than normal and while made up of men from several classes rather than from just the junior class, has nevertheless been given the largest grant of responsibility in its history by being asked to assume temporarily the duties of Palaeopitus and the Interdormitory Council along with its own traditional chores. We may have history in the making here, for there is no telling what this taste of supreme undergraduate power will do to the society or what the rambunctious sophomores will say when the juniors want to take back all their prerogatives.

An.d speaking of history, nothing could have been more .appropriate than that Dean Neidlinger should have been the prime mover in getting Green Key started up again. The Dean was one of the original group of students who founded the society in 1921, following the Dartmouth football team's happy experience with a similar society at the University of Washington, and it was in his room in Middle Mass that the organization meeting was held. It's not very often that a person gets to be both the founder and refounder of a campus society, and the Dean of the College seems to be in a strategic position to become also, if necessary, its unfounder.