Letters

"Mingled Reactions"

To THE EDITOR:

With interest, and mingled reactions, I have just read your editorial "The Dartmouth Image" in the February issue. You state that the job of the new Committee on Public Relations "is to get editors and the public to feel Ihe same way"—i.e. that winter sports and the loyalty of the alumni are "unique and colorful" but "not the heart of Dartmouth as a great educational institution."

I gather you (and perhaps you speak for the Committee) feel that the "fierce and imperishable loyalty of the alumni," dwelt upon by Budd Schulberg in his able article in "Holiday," is merely "the old popular image."

A lot of us have been laboring under the mistaken (?) idea all these years that it was largely the alumni that made Dartmouth great. Perhaps we have been "fed a line." Perhaps we have grown a bit egotistical.

And perhaps—perhaps, the Committee instead of working on editors and the general public should accept as its primary job the task of working on our own alumni body. Those of us who go back 25, 35 years and more in our association with Dartmouth will probably admit we have never heard as much "internal crabbing" among our alumni as we have in the past few years—crabbing about the selective system, crabbing about athletic policies and performances, crabbing about a score of matters.

If the aiumni are misinformed, it should be the job of the new committee to properly inform and put an end to most of this (I almost call it dissension) crabbing. If there is some justification for this state of affairs, then the committee will do well to suggest remedies. It is a fundamental principle in business to get your product right before you go out to sell it. Is it treason to ask if our Dartmouth "product," especially our alumni relations, is as "right" as it used to be?

Surely Dartmouth is first of all an educational institution; none of us will argue about that. But there are a lot of us who wonder if it is destined to be the producer of wellrounded men in the future, as it has been in the past. And there are some of us who will feel a bit hurt when reminded that our loyalty is part of only an "old popular image."

Miami, Fla.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The February comments occasioned by the creation of the new Committee on Public Relations were concerned with what the general public thinks of Dartmouth College and were written primarily to deprecate the fact that too often this "image" is related to Carnival and winter sports rather than to the distinguished educational work of the College. Because we quoted the whole of the Holiday heading, which speaks of the unique loyalty of our alumni after referring to Dartmouth as "the fresh-air college for men ... noted for virility and skill in winter sports," Mr. Gottschaldt puts a mistaken emphasis on the alumni reference. There is no chance of starting an argument with us about alumni support and what it has meant, and continues to mean, to Dartmouth.

We would repeat, however, that the main business of Dartmouth College is education and that "the heart of Dartmouth College as a great educational institution" (the words we used) is in its liberal arts purposes and in its day-by-day work to achieve those ends. It is our belief that the loyalty of Dartmouth alumni rests, in major part, upon what the College truly is and upon what such an independent institution means to this nation and to the free world. We would feel happier if the general public knew Dartmouth as its alumni and its friends know it and surely wish to have it known.

"More Realistic"

To THE EDITOR:

After many years of reading letters of the type written by Mr. Wolbarst '43, I'd like a chance to present the other and more realistic side of the picture.

I am inclined to doubt if Dartmouth or any other major university ever had a 100% AMATEUR, (the capitals are Mr. Wolbarst's) team in a major sport since the turn of the century. Any thinking individual should recognize that amateurism in college athletics has been an hypocritical mockery since before most of us were born. Whether the athlete is subsidized by all-out donations ranging into the thousands of dollars, as in the case of scores of young men in the sacrosanct Big Ten, Southwestern Conference, or P.C.C.: by out-and-out athletic scholarships, as in the Southeastern Conference; or by the hashing job at Commons, the scholarship for refraining from smoking and drinking, and the pennant-selling concession as at Dartmouth, these men can certainly be classed only as semi-pros at best. Granted, there is an occasional Barry Wood or Herb Fleishaker who garners AllAmerican laurels sans helping alumni or college hands. These few exceptions are certainly lost in the overwhelming deluge of "hired hands" with which every college varsity is loaded.

Let me interpolate here that I am 100% in favor of subsidization of athletes on the same basis that I am opposed to the return of National Prohibition: namely, that the alternatives, no matter how highly moral, just won't work. But, above all, I am anxious that Dartmouth take a determined and realistic stand on this problem. If the majority wills 100% de-emphasis, then let us de-emphasize, resume relations with Amherst, Tufts and Williams as in the Gay Nineties, and cease subjecting a fine bunch of kids to annual beatings from probably equally nice but infinitely more talented operatives from Princeton, Cornell and Penn. But if we are to compete on an equal basis with these and other schools, let's drop this "amateur" pretense and offer our SEMI-PROS (the capitals are mine) a better deal than at present, and get a few teams that will win other than moral victories.

I defy anyone to tell me of another institution of learning in this country possessing two men as able and respected in their fields as Tuss McLaughry and Doggie Julian. It has always struck me as ludicrous in the extreme to hire men of this caliber and then to expect them to win with little or no material. It would seem infinitely more in keeping with the so-called amateur spirit of which Mr. Wolbarst is so proud to discharge all paid coaches, rather than to hire two of the best men in the nation....

As to our paucity of scholarship aid, may I point out that the state of California has several regional scholarships ranging up to $1,000 in amount. To the best of my knowledge, in the last nineteen years there have been exactly two first-string football players and no regulars in any other major sport who came to college on these grants. And this from an area producing an army of phenomenal prep school athletes, as witness national track records and the rosters of professional football and baseball teams....

An extra ten thousand dollars spent annually in subsidization in addition to the funds Dartmouth now (let's face it) expends on athletes would probably bring in an additional hundred thousand at the box office, And, remember, you lovers of amateur sport, there is a box office and it does pay the freight for many other activities. I, for one, would be happy to contribute to a fund setting up scholarships to be awarded on the basis of Rhodes Scholarship grants, and I trust that hundreds of others in the Dartmouth alumni family will feel the same.

The alternative: fire McLaughry and Julian, who must be getting a little bitter at their annual position at or near the bottom of the Ivy League heap. Let them go to any of dozens of schools who would really appreciate them. Put Norwich, Hobart at al back on the schedule, and work up to a grand climax with a game with Amherst, whose semi-pros get even less than ours do.

Lawndale, Calif.