THE COLLEGE
Hanover Residents reluctant to face up to the fact that summer is over might be able to ignore the light scuffling of leaves under the elms, the ressembling of faculty families, or even the football squad hard at work both morning and afternoon on Memorial Field; but this week, the first after Labor Day, they could no longer be unaware that the opening of a new college year is almost here. The shop windows along Main Street have blossomed forth with student furniture, notebooks and 1953 pea-green caps; and the first 150 freshmen, plaidshirted and overflowing with determination to lick the wilderness, have arrived for the Dartmouth Outing Club's annual freshman trip to Moosilauke.
The summer in Hanover was like the summer everywhere else in the East; it was hot. And it was gone before you knew it. Most alumni think of Hanover as a drowsy spot in the summer, but that is only relatively true after the hubbub of the college year. The vacation population of the town seems to get steadily larger, and transient visitors to the College were more numerous than in any summer since the war. The Public Relations Council's student guide, adept at statistics as well as at answering questions, reports that up to September 7 he made 210 trips around the campus with 2,350 persons from 24 different states. Many of these persons, including campers and passengers on the busses making Hanover a regular stop on their tour of New England, saw Dartmouth movies or slides as well as the Orozco murals (in the news again when Orozco died September 7) and the wellkept buildings and grounds. Baker Library had 16 guest scholars from other colleges and universities during the summer, and the College provided Russell Sage dormitory and other facilities for two conferences: a one-week gathering of sales engineers sponsored by the National Machine Tool Builders' Association and a two-week conference of teachers and field workers sponsored by the American Association of Psychiatric Social Workers.
The latter group vacated Russell Sage only a few days before the freshman class began arriving for Freshman Week, starting September 13. For seven days prior to the official opening of College on September 21 the men of 1953 were scheduled to run the gamut of matriculation, orientation meetings, medical examinations, aptitude and proficiency tests, placement exams, and conferences with faculty advisers. In assigning the faculty advisers, each' of whom is to have about ten freshmen to counsel, Dean Morse spent a great deal of time this summer trying to match up the interests and hobbies of professors and freshmen so that their informal and friendly relationships might get off to a flourishing start. Fishermen and hunters, for example, would go to a member of the faculty like Bob McKennan '25, who could handle anthropologists too.
Like countless freshman classes before them, the men of 1953 each met the President of the College personally at the time of matriculation. To fulfill this traditional role President Dickey returned to Hanover from a two-weeks trip to Mexico where, in company with Dr. Thomas Parran, former U. S. Surgeon General, and Dean William I. Myers of the Cornell college of agriculture, he made a survey of the Rockefeller Foundation's hybrid corn-breeding program. President Dickey, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, left for Mexico near the end of August after vacationing in Ontario with his family for a month and then putting in a busy ten-day period in the office. Matriculation duties out of the way, he turned his attention to another traditional job, that of giving the address at the Convocation exercises officially opening the new college year.
The actual date of the opening of College—September 21—is worth noting because it is nine days earlier than previously planned and permits a return to the calendar of pre-war years. Two of the nine days will be devoted to an athletic holiday over the Harvard weekend, October 21-22, and the other seven days will be added to the spring recess, which will last 15 days instead of eight as last year. Dartmouth classes began October 1 last fall and a similar calendar called for a September go opening this year, but such a late beginning was found to have its disadvantages both intra- and extra-murally, so the old athletic holiday has returned and next spring the students and faculty will enjoy a longer escape from the mud season.
