Letters
Great Issues
To THE EDITOR:
The ALUMNI MAGAZINE could perform a genuine service by reporting in detail the lectures given in the Great Issues Course. If it covers questions significant enough to revamp the curriculum, we alumni should be as well informed on it as we are on the state of the current football team. EDWIN A. BOCK '43 London, England
EDITOR'S NOTE: TO Mr. Bock, former editorin-chief of The Dartmouth and now a student at the London School of Economics, we are glad to reply that our hopes and plans fit in very closely with his suggestion. Much of the Great Issues material is strictly off the record, but there will still be opportunity to present other lectures in full or in abstract form.
A Clean Contest
To THE EDITOR:
The attached clipping came from the editorial page of last evening's New Haven Register which I thought to be of sufficient interest to Dartmouth alumni to pass on to you.
Very likely you were among the thousands of the college's alumni who enjoyed seeing the clean fight the team made last Saturday afternoon and so can appreciate the well-earned commendation expressed in this editorial:
POINTING WITH PRIDE
Yale University's football team defeated Dartmouth in the Bowl last Saturday by a 23-14 margin. That is a matter of history for the 63,000 to witness this colorful spectacle. It has been made a matter of record through the headlines in sport pages throughout the nation.
The highlights and statistics have been stressed and commented upon. Little note was taken of the fact that this contest, despite the intense rivalry between the two institutions and the traditional quality which this game has acquired over long years of athletic competition, drew but three minor penalties. The competing athletes, the coaches of both schools, their faculty administrators and their student bodies should draw both satisfaction and pride from this fact.
It speaks volumes for the high degree of sportsmanship connected with this encounter, which down through the years has brought 21 victories to Yale, six to Dartmouth and a never-to-be forgotten 33-33 tie. The sons of Old Eli and the men who have gone out into the world after their years in the hills of Hanover, as this game attested, play the game hard, but as gentlemen. The standards they have maintained offer a worthy national pattern.
Branford, Conn.
"A Mild Protest"
To THE EDITOR:
The quaint misconceptions of the article by Mr. Archibald MacLeish, as printed in your last number of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE, might be ignored as the aberrations of an otherwise brilliant man if the material had not been presented as a sort of "keynote address" for the new Great Issues course. Under this circumstance, at least a mild protest seems proper.
The popular stereotype of a college professor has long been a shabbily dressed and somewhat elderly fuddy-duddy, bemused with useless learning, so absent-minded that he puts his umbrella to bed and himself in the umbrella rack, and so isolated from the practical world that he is more familiar with Julius Caesar than with Joseph Stalin. We college professors have long trained ourselves to accept such a characterization with a sort of amused tolerance, but we have a right to expect something a little more realistic from the "keynote address" for Great Issues.
Mr. MacLeish pictures the college professor as a specialist in some subject of little current importance, probably Latin, and with a vague feeling that by some rs-.ysterious mental legerdemain a knowledge of Tacitus will be transmuted into practical decisions. The precious but futile old dear—and "precious" is the MacLeish word—believes in "education for education's sake," and will feel
"no embarrassment in admitting over the teacups or the cocktail glasses that what a liberal education really educates you for is not the living of life but the leisure hour at the day's end when the cultivated man may take down the volume of Pater." This fantastic creature has not even the virtues of earnestness and vigor—for Mr. MacLeish admits that his own discourse is "much more emphatic and earnest than academic lectures are expected to be."
The kindest comment about this point of view is that possibly it represents the Yale of Mr. MacLeish's youth. Certainly Yale is the only college to which he refers specifically, and then only to his undergraduate days. On the other hand, however, the possibility that Yale fitted the description within the last half century seems rather doubtful. Without generalizing too broadly, I would like to bear testimony that the description does not apply to Dartmouth at any time during the 25 years that I have had the honor of being a member of the faculty. Members of the college community have been intelligent, active and wellinformed citizens. More pertinently, they have commonly had a deep conviction of the immediate applicability of their specialties to the contemporary world, and have showed these applications to their students. Anyone who knows the Dartmouth scene realizes, for example, that practically everything in the Great Issues course is presented one or many times elsewhere in the College, even though not with as much national publicity. Incidentally, lest anyone else be a half century behind the times, Latin and mathematics are no longer the heart of the present college curriculum; to be precise, 23 Dartmouth undergraduates are now enrolled in Latin courses.
After Mr. MacLeish demolishes his pretty mental conceit, he then pays glowing tribute to such men as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who were products of exactly the type of education which he earlier discarded as practically worthless. At that point the present reader would have quit in discouragement if he had not still been searching for the answer to the question which was the title of the paper: "What Is a Great Issue?" As events transpired he might well' have stopped, since no understandable answer was ever given.
There can be no objection in a democracy to Mr. MacLeish holding any beliefs he feels justified, nor in stating them to anyone who will listen. On the other hand, however, the Great Issues course presumably has an obligation to the College and to its own students. If a lecturer on educational matters can not be himself educated to avoid the worst blunders, at least his speech need not be given publicity, with the impression that it is acceptable to the course and to the College. Surely the Great Issues course has sufficient real virtues that it does not need to be propagandized by means of misleading and unjustified claims.
Hanover, N. H.
Professor of History
A Letter from Joe
To THE EDITOR:
I wonder if you would like my impression of our alumni letters which usually start off:
"Well, right on top of the mail this week is good old Stitch Mac Inaw who writes a most interesting letter about his Boy Scout work in Beauford, Penn. It seems for six years good old Stitch was assistant scoutmaster of Troop 31 and now he has been made scoutmaster. He writes that he has thirty-one scouts of which nine are first class, eighteen second class and fourteen are Tenderfeet. He also writes about the long hike they took from Beauford to Waterford, a distance of seven miles which they did in 21/9 hours and beat the old record by five minutes. In addition to the marvelous collection of wild flowers, they saw a white tailed wren, the earliest that has ever been seen in the southern part of northeast Pennsylvania. Gosh, what times old Stitch and I had when we roomed togetherl
"Next in line is Buford Jones, my old fraternity brother, who writes that he is engaged again, this time to Mary Lou McAllister of Dallas, Texas. We surely hope this one sticks, Buford, old boy! By the way, if you are engaged, who was that beautiful blond you were with in Boston last week? If Mary Lou sees this, I am just kidding.
"Here is another letter from Mudrow, the old football center, and one of my closest friends. He writes very interestingly about all the good times we had at college and that he will be at my house again for the next two weeks after he has been there for the last six weeks.
"There are also letters from Johnston McCrary, whom I can't quite place at school; John J. Raskob, Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and several classmates, one from Lysle Beauford giving the details of a sevenyear trip among the two-headed, man-eating tribes in the upper Amazon, all of which, I regret, I have no space to print.
"I guess you have seen the results of the Class election. Where, ha, ha, they made me, ha, ha, accept the nomination for secretary again. The Nominating Committee was Buffer Crier, my roommate, James Buffer Logan and John Axelson, who, by the way, is working hard in Hartford for Buffer Jones. For president, much against his will and much to his surprise, Buffer Jones was nominated and will be installed with appropriate ceremonies next week. The vice-president is James Logan and the treasurer, Art McNally, my old roommate and fraternity brother. It just looks like the same old bunch has to do the job when something has to be done. I can't see why some more of you fellows are not interested in Class affairs. But that's the way it goes—the natural leaders just have to take over.
"And don't forget to write me as I am always glad to hear from you."
EDITOR'S NOTE: It is not the practice of the MAGAZINE to run anonymous communications, but a majority of the editors feel that we ought to make an exception in this amusing case, using the occasion to point out that all letters to the editor must be signed if they are to be published.
