Shades of Eleazar!

Dartmouth college has a reputation for ruggedness which goes clear back to the Indian school days before the American Revolution. The founder, Eleazar Wheelock, who, the old song tells us, is now in a better land than this, was a rugged man, as his exploits attest.

And Dartmouth men generally even down to the present effete day have a kind of tribal ruggedness about them which sets them apart from the products of other ivy-league colleges. Indeed you have got to be rugged to stand those Hanover winters.

So it is not likely that Dartmouth or Dartmouth men will be disturbed unduly by the Chicago Tribune's declaration of war upon the college. The fiercest blasts which the Tribune can manage are as nothing compared with the north winds which blow along the Connecticut in the winter term.

Dartmouth, it appears, has established a course called "Great Issues," which deals with international problems. The course is required for graduation, and is designed to give Dartmouth students some understanding of the political, economic, and social forces now on the loose throughout the world.

The idea is admirable and similar courses are to be found in other colleges. What has brought down the wrath of the Tribune upon Dartmouth is the fact that in the Dartmouth course the' Tribune is the favorite "horrible example" of journalistic impropriety in the international field.

The Tribune complains that copies of the newspaper have been posted on Dartmouth bulletin boards with "slurring comments" on the Tribune's "deviation from the pure America Last doctrine." It goes on to say that Tribune-hating has never been a profitable enterprise and cites the sorry end of "the Lorimer-Thompson-Small gang" and the Capone hoodlums.

The Tribune denunciation of Dartmouth makes exciting reading. The Tribune knows, of course, that to impugn the patriotism and integrity of Dartmouth college is a preposterous undertaking. And ready as it is to criticize others it can't very well argue that it is not to be criticized itself.

All this gnashing of editorial teeth on the part of the Tribune seems hardly warranted.

October 25, 1948

EDITOR'S NOTE: The above editorial, an article in Time Magazine of November 1, and several other newspaper and magazine accounts which alumni may have seen were occasioned by a series of five articles and two editorials about Dartmouth which appeared in the Chicago Tribune from October 18 on. The Great Issues Course and the international thinking of President Dickey and members of the faculty were singled out for attack, and the Tribune took vituperative exception to its inclusion in a Dartmouth library display designed to show the different ways in which news stories can be slanted to conform to the editorial policies of different newspapers.

The College has refused to engage in any public controversy with the Tribune, being willing to let the issue rest on Dartmouth's reputation and its long history of service to the nation. The only statement made by the College was not a rebuttal; it was simply a report of the background facts, written in advance of publication of the Tribune articles and printed in The Bulletin, a mimeographed newsletter which goes regularly to Trustees, members of the Alumni Council, and class and club officers.

During the past month, to those Dartmouth alumni whose addresses it could obtain, the Tribune has mailed reprints of its Dartmouth articles and editorials, together with a covering letter from Managing Editor J. Loy Maloney '13.