The Undergraduate Chair
THIS is the balmy season with men shagging baseballs out on the green or slouching along past the Ad Building eating ice cream cones. The Bermuda Trip vacationers and the Florida sojourners, as tan as Melanesians, have returned with tall tales of surf swimming and glass-bottomed boats.
Dartmouth men finally okayed a petition allying themselves with the National Student Association. This includes regional and national offices supported by many local chapters. At last we emerge from our individualistic backwoods aflame with a cooperative spirit.
A committee of Dartmouth men will visit Bates, Harvard, M.1.T., Smith and Holyoke, the latter two being route favorites. There they will find out more about purchase cards that entitle an N.S.A. member to discounts with 150 merchants in seventeen cities.
Next year's budget, voted by the alumni council to finance the local organization, amounts to about four hundred dollars. We will all receive the N.S.A. News and send three voting delegates to a National Student Congress. The News considers student tours abroad, seminars and other intercollegiate items.
In view of the College's community spirit, unique among Ivy League schools, Dartmouth men find it difficult to comprehend the tenor of the last two unfortunate months. They are prone to search for answers and look for trends where none exist.
College life includes such tactics as good- natured rough-housing, contact sports and daredevil skiing, and athletes are expected to weather some hard knocks. Although we dislike brawls, college life anticipates a few when one path crosses another, since all men are not pacifists. College life includes liquor, a facet of almost every college man's environment and a hospitable social addition. Yet circulating in every crowd are men at war with themselves for whom grain spirits offer an easy transit to that hazy world of "being stoned." The College itself presupposes socially mature men arriving in Hanover for matriculation and offers them freedoms such as owning a deer rifle or staying up all night or keeping a flagon of rum on the mantelpiece. These freedoms are a vital part of college life from U.C.L.A. to N.Y.U. After fulfilling certain commitments to classes and grades, the Dartmouth student has the run of all the villages from Lyme to Lewiston. If in the midst of this laissez-faire atmosphere he loses his sense of proportion, the College as a whole is concerned but not really responsible. Responsibility reaches back to Main Street in the home town where the prospective college man studied under the best available faculty, the family. For them, prep schools are a shaky substitute.
We all know the college routine like a book and expect certain elements of a social vacuum in a man's town. For five days we pound a typewriter and squint at fine type and take pot luck at the Nugget. Some of the book learning offers real insight into human affairs. Some of it, consisting of graphs, charts, truisms and oversimplifications, is real demagoguery. Some men really spend time in Baker while others can cut their studying time to the quick and still hang on for four years. In addition to books, almost everyone enjoys some program of sports at Dartmouth, since all studying and no weight-lifting undermines appetite and enthusiasm.
Nights when the nation's breadwinners are playing Monopoly with the kids or out dancing, uptown, the college man is reading The Foundations of National Power or writing a sententious essay as proof that he can spell and punctuate.
On the sixth day, Saturday, he rests. After anticipating Saturday night, the night reserved for relaxation, he finds it, in Hanover, a colossal flop. Lyme and Lewiston, both beautiful by day, are impregnable by night. There are no dances in this college town for some 1300 nonfraternity men although they are welcome at the houses. Saturday night boils down to the Nugget, usually a movie little better than a marionette show set to music. Men drop by the houses for a beer, sing the Old Songs three or four times, and then go home to bed. Poker games, once the sport of student princes, are almost extinct.
The College Taproom, a move toward giving Dartmouth men a place of their own, reminds one comedian of a remodeled wash room. The cement floor, the cold tile walls, the stark tables and chairs, and the sign that reads "No singing allowed," all emasculate the infant Rath-skellar. We would all enjoy a Tavern hang our hats and raise our voices in song. Some New Hampshire State laws and some town laws, probably passed by men who mix excellent Martinis, discourage this, kind of conviviality.
If the student breaks the bond and drives South to Wheaton, Wellesley or Smith he finds sociability thriving in vari- ous recreation halls, Student-Alumni Buildings, or out at Toto's. Remaining in Hanover he sees only a smattering of women embellishing the campus on the average weekend and this points to a serious rift in a bi-polar world. Is it the lack of tangible entertainment in Hanover that discourages the hosts? Or shall we instigate get acquainted weekends—fifty stunning blind dates for fifty Dartmouth men?
Establishing some kind of active social rapport with other schools will alleviate the social vacuum. Saturday night will no longer be, as the song says, "the loneliest night in the week."
