Mr. Brower's Bombshell

When a new directorate of The Dartmouth takes over, the students, faculty and administration (not exactly in that order) look to the opening editorial with special interest and a touch of anxiety. At a Norwich Inn banquet on Saturday evening, March 8, The Dartmouth announced its new editorial board, headed by Brock H. Brower '53 of Westfield, N. J., as editor-in-chief. In traditional fashion, the issue of the following Monday morning carried the credo of the incoming directorate.

We have no intention of concealing our joy over what Mr. Brower wrote. With a bow in the direction of such solid newspapermen as William Allen White and the Hough brothers, Henry and George, the new editor declared:

"We think back on these men because their papers were—and are—what TheDartmouth can be—and should be: a local newspaper with a loud voice and a nibble of fame.' Not that these men represented a vapid provincialism. They each had a sense of world being, but they never forgot that their corners of the world were Emporia or Martha's Vineyard or the rump end of Cape Cod.

"Our corner of the world is Dartmouth College at Hanover, N. H. It is our first attention. We frankly admit the confines of the microcosm. We are more concerned with the success of an honor system and improvement of the faculty adviser system at the College than with the success of Antoine Pinay's French Cabinet or the rearming of Western Germany. . . .

"We are not going to overlook our backyard. The one with the whitewash fence. It is our point of tangency with the greater backyard.

"So, at our beginning, we conceive of ourselves as a local newspaper with a sense of world being. We also conceive ourselves as having a loud voice."

There are quite a few of us who have held for years that The Dartmouth ought to get on with its main business of covering the local news, leaving to somewhat bigger journals such as The Neiu YorkTimes the job of reporting the international situation. To this school of thinkers the March 10 editorial made good reading, and the contents of succeeding issues looked like an earnest effort to deliver on the promises made. The campus was enjoying the honeymoon but it would soon have to faceup to the startling possibility that it might have to give up the comfortable habit of saying unkind things about TheDaily D.