Our Public Relations

AT the annual mid-winter meeting of the Dartmouth Alumni Council in Chicago in January, the public relations of the College were discussed at some length and an alumni advisory committee, to work with officers of the College, was approved. Last month President Dickey took an important step in this field of college administration when he created a new Public Relations Council, under the chairmanship of Sidney C. Hayward '26, Secretary of the College, and delegated to it responsibility for determining general public relations policies, planning and executing a broad program of strengthened relations with all the various publics interested in the College,. and coordinating the activities of the many offices and organizations on the campus which are directly involved in these relations. Although not a member of the new Public Relations Council, President Dickey will be in close touch with it on matters of general policy, and the three prominent and experienced alumni named by the Alumni Council will serve as advisory members.

At the present time, Dartmouth's public relations are in some respects good and in other respects weak, adding up to a general condition that might be described as adequate rather than outstanding. As the product of the more or less independent activities of offices and organizations as varied and numerous as the Admissions Office, News Service, Athletic Council, Hanover Inn, ALUMNI MAGAZINE, Dartmouth College Films, Outing Club, and Council on Student Organizations, to name but an incomplete list, the public relations of the College have lacked coordination and overall planning. These deficiencies the new Council should remedy, and beyond that it should also provide initiative for new undertakings directed toward clearly defined objectives. The one objective of paramount importance, the Council has already announced, will be to secure for Dartmouth a wider public knowledge of the educational life of the College. To achieve that goal Dartmouth may have to battle its own colorful and romantic qualities, for over the years the extracurricular life of the College, headed by Winter Carnival, has had great appeal for the press and has served to minimize in the public mind the serious, and distinguished, educational work done in Hanover. Those responsible for public relations policy probably will not choose to forfeit the publicity values in Dartmouth's distinctive nonacademic pursuits; the problem is not one of chopping down on that side so much as it is one of building up on the other, to the point where Dartmouth's equally distinctive educational accomplishments will not only balance but greatly outweigh winter sports, football and campus life in the public mind.

To talk of public relations in these terras, however, is to treat the subject much too narrowly. A common failing, to which alumni are sometimes as prone as anyone else, is to confuse the broad field of public relations with the segment known as publicity. The latter has its promotional importance certainly, and it also has the appeal of being more tangible than some other phases of the problem, but its desirable place in the public relations program of an educational institution continues to be a matter of lively debate, especially with those members of the faculty who are willing, as of old, to dispense with it entirely. Far from being limited to publicity alone, public relations are involved at every point where the College comes into contact with the general public or with any member of its special publics, including students, faculty, alumni, parents, prospective students, secondary schools, sister colleges, and so on down the line. The college switchboard operator handling a single call from outside is involved in public relations, and so is President Dickey when he speaks to millions over the radio. The alumnus answering a question about the College far from Hanover is involved in Dartmouth public relations, and so is the student right on the campus who stops to answer the question of a motorist driving through town on his way to the White Mountains Public relations simply exist, in many forms, just as human relations exist; and the only question is whether they are good or bad.

Good public relations are not manufactured out of thin air; they depend inescapably upon what the College is and how it goes about doing its job. The moral here does not need to be labored, nor should it be necessary to point out that on this score Dartmouth's new Public Relations Council starts off with the prestige and essential quality of the College already widely recognized. Even so, the Council must be constantly mindful of the basic conditions out of which all public relations grow and must not consider it outside the scope of its responsibilities to make proposals about those conditions.

Important as the new Council promises to be in giving direction and unity to the public relations efforts of the College, its success will be negligible unless every individual connected with Dartmouth College understands the fact that he is in a very real sense a public relations agent for the College. And among all these representatives, no group has quite the importance of the alumni, with their numerical strength, their wide distribution throughout the country, and their understanding of what Dartmouth College is all about. The ALUMNI MAGAZINE recognizes its responsibility to keep its 17,000 alumni readers informed just as fully as possible about the accomplishments, plans and policies of the College, for they have always been Dartmouth's most effective envoys to the nation at large. They are, in truth, Dartmouth's real Public Relations Council.