Lights and Labyrinths
Welcomed at the Hanover Inn, the alumnus allows his gaze to wander towards Baker Library, and there on the weathervane against an infinity of sky he may notice the diminutive grandeur of the pine tree and beneath it the Lilliputian stature of the two men, separated one from the other, concerned about enlightenment. The symbolism may be better at night with a shaft of light playing on a spire of meaning about which a thousand dormitory windows glow orange, cobwebbed by chaotic cold boughs and the unpatterned laciness of twigs near enough to the warmth of learning to blossom again.
Baker is the sun of our intellectual universe; it is the blood bank of the ages; it is the backbone of a complicated organism of learning beneath the almost forgotten Redman and the White, floating in the clouds; it is the central heating plant that keeps the ink in our pens from freezing; it is the muscular heart that pumps blood to the lungs and brain of Dartmouth.
In a college our size, a great danger arises that fatty degeneration may develop about that heart, but Baker has an expert of some thirty years' experience with a stethoscope perpetually in his hand to check on hardening arteries, high blood pressures, thromboses, and anginas. His name is Nathaniel L. Goodrich. He has chosen as his clinical assistant Alexander Laing '25, a specialist in arteriosclerosis. Putting the matter in more bibliographical terms, one may suggest the immensity as well as the delicacy of Mr. Goodrich's duties when one points out that Baker has received publicity recently because it catalogued its 600,000th book; that Baker subscribes to 1,800 magazines, has a yearly payroll of $120,000 for its staff of 68, issues yearly at the circulation desk 65,000 books, and at the reserve desk 120,000 books for students preparing outside assignments for courses. Is it more impressive with one end of the telescope to see that despite mass intake in the library it costs Dartmouth a dollar to catalogue a book and another dollar to throw a book away, or with the other end of the telescope to see that because of its miles of shelves and acres of reading rooms it costs $9,945 a year to heat?
The alumnus likes to think of Mr. Goodrich as the man who has combed catalogues and American and foreign book shops to bring to Dartmouth an immense number of rare and useful books and collections, and he may be agreeably surprised to learn how high a standing Baker has among college librarians and disagreeably surprised to learn how little known she is by the American public. Many men are interested in her welfare. Active and successful have been the Friends of the Library directed by Professor Herbert F. West '22, who has given his own collections of Cunninghame Graham, C. M. Doughty, Wilfrid Blunt, Edward Garnett, George Santayana, and Richard Curie. Harold G. Rugg '06, Assistant Librarian, has been influential with his wide knowledge of old books. The alumnus may well be proud of the distinguished collections now in Baker—of Conrad, Melville, Stephen Crane, Katherine Mansfield, and H. M. Tomlinson given by George Matthew Adams; of H. L. Mencken, Norman Douglas, and Aldous Huxley given by Richard H. Mandel '26; the Brooke and Burns collections; the George Ticknor Collection received two or three years ago; the Rowfant Club Collection given by Dr. Robert M. Stecher '19. Other donors worthy of mention are the late Matt B. Jones '94, Warde Wilkins '13, the two Tom Streeters '04 and '44, H. L. Mencken, Thomas Le Due, Basil O'Connor '12, Eric T. Ball '18, Rowland Myers '28, Mrs. Bella Landauer, the late Samuel K. Bell '09, William P. Winch, President-Emeritus Ernest M. Hopkins, William J. Schaldach, Paul Sample '20, Mrs. Frances Hand, Harold Hamilton Gibson '97.
Mr. Goodrich must devise methods whereby books, manuscripts, maps, prints, and periodicals of all nations and all times written in all languages get placed on the right shelves. His problem is here in a Hanover winter to line up Baker books that back to back would reach out from Hanover many miles towards the North Pole and to get students warmed with desire and alert with immediate touch. With this problem solved, or partially solved, another larger one immediately arises for further consideration—cataloguing facilities and reference space must be enlarged and the staff expanded, all of which costs money. Should Baker expand?
Dartmouth is no longer so small a college as it was, and there are graduates who welcome size. Why, yes, enlarge the space in Baker, expand the staff, run up the bills; the graduates are faithful. Yet enthusiasm, loyalty, space, and staff are not enough, not even money. One discovers that one must talk eventually in terms of definition. What is Dartmouth trying to do? And what, Baker? Proud and yet apologetic at the same time about Hanover's isolation, expansive alumni might be tempted to vie with Harvard. Cannot Baker be "as good" as Widener? Well, no. Harvard and Dartmouth are different: one is a university, a group of scholars internationally known concentrating primarily on graduate students, on scholarship, on the advancement of learning, on setting back the frontier of knowledge; the other is a college, a group if teachers perhaps not even nationally known, concentrating primarily on undergraduate students, on the formation of their character, on inculcation of taste, on the development of responsible ideas of citizenship and only secondarily on research and creative scholarship. Harvard asks first of all: can you produce? Dartmouth asks first of all: can you teach? In one, good teaching may be a by-product of creative research; in the other, creative research may be a by-product of good teaching.
The administration is attempting to keep the future of Baker in view as well as the present. A coordinator for administration, faculty, and student body in Baker has been appointed: Professor George C. Wood, who is attempting in a practical way to see that the contents of Baker shelves circulate most advantageously. He wants not only to get undergraduates and professors into the stacks but also to get the richness of the stacks out into the daylight where they can be read. Furthermore, it is part of his problem to evaluate the ideals toward which in the future Baker should strive.
To the ideals of the college Baker Library is still dedicated. But as the books and manuscripts pour in, as the million mark already can be sighted, one feels the urge to become international, even cosmic. It is gratifying to know that already Dartmouth has a reputation as far west as the Pacific for its scholarly collections inviting scholars from all over the United States to use the studies in the stacks during summer vacations. With European libraries on the move, we could easily build up vast reserves of special material which Dartmouth students could never use but which outside scholars, one or two here and there, would like. For whom is Baker being administered, for our undergraduates and faculty who want a working library, or for the outside world of graduate students and scholars, who would welcome our scholarly wealth and our unique and esoteric collections?
The next step in one's thinking is: Has Dartmouth fulfilled its function? In these crucial years following world-wide up- heaval which is still far from happy security, should we not expand and become a university? To some the outlook is pleasant; there is prestige value; we become truly international in work as well as in spirit—Dartmouth University.
To Dartmouth College, however, the faculty and the administration are still dedicated. The Old Grad and the Young Undergrad like to think as they look up towards Baker Tower that President Dickey may be working in his study up there among the bells with a window looking out on the campus of undergraduate life. About him in one capacity or another librarians are ready to open rare and beautiful books in the Treasure Room where professors volunteer to spend their afternoons and act as guides to the two or three students who may wander in, a satisfactory number if one thinks in terms of decades. With recreational and other readers, the Tower Room is crowded end to end, alcove to alcove. In another section some of the 50,000 maps recently given Baker by the Government may be on display with Professor Van Harvey English ready to make explanations. The periodical room is rarely empty. The reserve desk with its traffic in learning would make a bonfire- loving Nazi sick with frustration. The main lobby may be filled by a Milton exhibition prepared by undergraduates, or by a Chaucer or Burns exhibition prepared by Professor Joel W. Egerer.
The newest and perhaps most exciting innovation in keeping Baker active as an undergraduate library is President Dickey's plan for the new Great Issues course, compulsory for all seniors. In accord with the increasing tendency to consider librarians educators as well as custodians, President Dickey with a steering committee is studying procedures in the administration and content of the course which many believe is going to revolutionize undergraduate intellectual spirit.
It is symbolic of the changing spirit at Dartmouth that President Dickey and his steering committee are planning the new course in his Baker Tower study at the center of intellectual activity.
A tentative plan is to redesign the basement level of the southeast wing of Baker to accommodate fifty seniors in a reading room and another fifty in a reading laboratory, a glass wall separating the two. Thus, about one-fifth of the senior class can be taken care of simultaneously. The reading laboratory will contain extensive and selective information about the great issue under examination each week, highly fluid and highly pertinent information: the latest books and articles, pamphlets public and private, newspapers from the most conservative to the most radical, from die Wall Street Journal to the Daily Worker. Persuaded that events simply do not happen overnight, President Dickey and the steering committee will attempt to provide significant backgrounds with proper tools to work in them. Not unpleasing is the spectacle of the administration, faculty, and library staff working daily and intimately in the year before our students go out into the world with the most practical, indeed with the great issues of our time. And what are they? One may assume with a fair amount of confidence that among them will be presented such controversial subjects as security in an atomic age, Russian and American points of view, the struggle for oil, the decline of faith and the growth of cynicism in the modern world, justice for Arabs and Jews and oppressed minorities, the socialist experiment in Great Britain, responsible leadership in management and labor, our Asiatic policies, information and propaganda, and democracy in a totalitarian world. Dartmouth is no one voice crying in a wilderness; in dormitories, faculty homes, fraternities, and classrooms many voices discuss the implications inherent in the Great Issues Course, in which for two years at least the President will play the directing role. The best minds in the country will come to lecture for an hour to our entire senior class meeting as a unit. During a preliminary hour they will have been primed for the topic by the President, Dartmouth professors, and other experts. And they will have primed themselves in the Great Issues Laboratory and Reading Room. In a third hour seniors will experience the pleasure of measuring their minds against America's best in an hour of open discussion.
Dartmouth seniors will develop, it is hoped, intellectual and emotional standards never before realized in the history of Dartmouth. For an entire academic year meeting three times a week as a unit in the classroom and a half dozen times a week in small groups in the Baker Laboratory and Reading Room, seniors will be thinking in terms not only of their own future, of their class's, and of their college's, but also of their country's and of the world's. It is an exciting prospect: from nearly every state in the union and a few foreign countries, from every variety of social and spiritual backgrounds, Dartmouth students during their last and most important year will watch our best minds analyze the complications in great issues and show how the headlines are distillations of a series of events building up through the years and leading to the tensions of the present which must be eased. The seniors will be working below Baker Tower, which has the President's study overlooking the campus and a clock which allows less time than it used to for decisions which if made unwisely may lead to a slave world based on persecution and hatred and if made wisely to a free world based on fair play and understanding.
