A Perennial "Problem"
ONE of the most absorbing subjects for casual talk and serious speculation during the final months of the college year has been the business of being a volunteer resident in a community where one's comings and goings are of more than passing interest to a great many people other than those whose specific business it is to enforce decorum and good order.
Parents, alumni, and the public have a prior and rightful interest in what goes on at Dartmouth outside as well as in the classroom; in the aftermath of a tragedy which every Dartmouth man, in and out of college, has felt deeply, the undergraduate community has been put, fairly or not, in a position where the reputation of the College is a matter of individual, unremitting concern, on and off the campus.
As with any such topic of undergraduate conversation, a number of easy shibboleths have arisen to form a kind of jargon whenever the matter is discussed. For example, it has been common—and not exclusively among the undergraduate component of the College—to refer to the question of undergraduate behavior as a "problem" and to look upon the most pressing aspect of the whole consideration as "the drinking problem."
The result has been twofold—on the one hand, adverse, and on the other, advantageous. First and salutary, the notion of a "drinking problem" has impressed upon many undergraduates the idea that a "solution" is required; but at the same time, it has tended to obscure the larger issue of education to responsibility and selfcontrol in every area of human conduct which the College has before it for surveillance. A "problem" implies an imperative for drastic action; yet if there is one conviction shared by modern educators, it is that penalties and prohibitions are as futile as they are dangerous to the purposes of higher education.
Most undergraduates would be prepared to defend the Proposition that there is no "drinking problem" at Dartmouth. They would argue that Dartmouth students are c°operative, intelligent and temperate in a proportion which few adult communities can match. No one coulcl deny, of course, that there are "cases"—that an occasional undergraduate, impelled by an immature and often temporary wish to prove emancipation, wit or vigor, will suspend the usual high standards of what is acceptable behavior in the dorms, the fraternities or around the campus. It would be comforting to say at the same time that this minority is given short shrift in the judgment of their associates. It is probably more accurate and more important to admit that a great many major, though officially undetected, offenses against written and unwritten codes of conduct, while not condoned, go at least uncensured by fellow students who would never allow themselves a similar breach of decency.
This is not to propose that Dartmouth undergraduates ought to take upon themselves the job of seeing to the probity of their fellow-students' private lives in any detail but rather to suggest that it ought to be a matter of common acknowledgment that, at very least, social recognition will be denied a man who considers it smart to violate the standards which are the external evidence of the probity of Dartmouth College. It is also to suggest that some of what might, under normal circumstances, be relegated to the status "pecadillos, youthful" become, in the abnormal circumstances of this year, matters of more serious concern; it is a matter of College interest, under these conditions, that the individual student consider himself his brother's keeper.
Ultimately, of course, the "problem" must be placed squarely at the feet of the minority who make it. The regulations of the College, consistent with the educational aims of Dartmouth, are cast to reconcile the need for good order and respectability which is required if the College is to do its work, with the necessary training in self-control as preparation for the freedom which post-Dartmouth society allows its members. The rules are therefore devised in favor of the great majority, equipped by environment and inclination to profit by the chance to behave well by free choice instead of by police assistance, rather than for the perverse, incorrigible or irresponsible few less well equipped.
Thus, while the regulations governing drinking in no sense convey encouragement or approval of the use of liquor while in college, they do recognize that it is both unrealistic and unfair to graduate a man from Dartmouth into a society where he must decide for himself whether he will or will not drink, if he has not somehow been equipped beforehand in the exercise of his own will. The rules of course penalize the specific results of the abuse of privileges extended.
The President's informal discussions of the regulations at various meetings of undergraduates—which ought, eventually, to include every student in the College—has done a great deal to communicate the nature of the situation and the spirit which informs the rules and their interpretation. The revival of talks by members of the administration over WDBS on various phases of student life ought perhaps to be considered too, as well as the utilization of the columns of The Dartmouth from time to time for similar purposes.
Granted that in its accumulated wisdom and experience, the College is most likely to be correct in its judgment of what constitutes appropriate behavior, then if those judgments differ much from the ones a given student exercises, there is an educational as well as a disciplinary problem posed. Meanwhile, the College must be about its business in an orderly and stable atmosphere. As a short-run expedient, then, students expect that the College will insist that its norms for what is acceptable be consistently acknowledged by the student as a condition of remaining in good standing in the College. The realistic and perceptive student has recognized at once the justice of that insistence. Perhaps the immature, the reckless and the irresponsible have not. But even in that event, both the
College and his fellow students retain the obligation to bring home at all times to any one of these that the forfeit of his access to a Dartmouth education in exchange for a night's excess is the greatest enormity he can possibly commit upon himself.
Francis J. Bealey '47, whose home is inBellerose, N. Y., has been Editor-in-Chiefof The Dartmouth during the past year.His picture appears on Page IJ.
