1953 Fund Running Ahead in Amount and Contributors
RUNNING ahead of last year's record on all fronts, the Dartmouth Alumni Fund drive at its midpoint on May 15 was $47,000 ahead of the total in hand at that time last year, and 1400 to the good in the number of contributors. With $333,000 collected from 7,952 alumni, parents, and friends, more than half of the objective of $600,000 had been reached at the halfway mark in the 1953 campaign, with 46 days left before the end of the drive on June 30.
An innovation this past month was the mailing piece sent by the Fund Committee to alumni who had not yet made their contributions. Written by Sinclair H. Hitchings '54, of Southport, Fla., managing editor of the Quarterly, a scholarship student, and a Senior Fellow next year, his was the first Fund message to be provided by an undergraduate. He was invited to write as one of the hundreds of Dartmouth undergraduates now on scholarship aid —an advantage the 1953 Alumni Fund hopes to extend to others by means of the money raised this year. Describing what Dartmouth means to him, Hitchings wrote in part:
"Seldom has it been harder for students to breeze by the obligation to take college seriously. Yet always there has been the range of attitudes we know today. Always, along with those many who have felt a four-year holiday before entering the confinements of life was reason enough for colleges, there have been boys eager to justify their life at college by growing swiftly and sensibly toward maturity. And there have always been men and women willing to give a hand to students whose very inability to pay for college education helps them to understand what college offers. "Over the years the gap between giver and recipient has widened, with the college assuming a strongly central position. For the individuals dividuals who give and receive, the challenge of the investment has not changed. Opportunities are entrusted to the student with mingled hope and confidence. They are his ground to plow and plant, loaned with expectations of that wise agriculture which puts back into the land more than it takes out.
"My own experience at Dartmouth has partly been a succession of surprises at happening onto unexpected ideas and opportunities. College is full of so many more open doors than we guessed, with all our speculations. I came here to grow and mark my growth in development as a writer. After prep school Dartmouth was a new world of freedom yet not so much freedom, I discovered, as some boys crossing an important borderline in education might profitably have accepted. Social sciences psychology, sociology, economics came as requirements which held all the fascination of newness. Art never stopped being a surprise, and literature remained too much fun to become a study. After a time came the familiar sequel to entering college a tide of skepticism, exciting, then valuable, for it reaffirmed that meaning in life is to be found by participating rather than observing. The positive commitment of Christianity became the highest challenge....
"From the top of Bartlett Tower the breathless climber looks out over the bell towers of Baker Library and Dartmouth Hall and the sharp spire of the White Church, up and down the Connecticut Valley. From the far hills to Hanover mapped out below, it is a good sight. Sun and shadow on the white brick of the central halls. .. and a 12:15 outpouring of students crowding the paths across the green. The student whose privilege has been to live and work here with the aid of a scholarship surveys that scene with very particular feelings of gratitude and aspiration."
SCHOLARSHIP STUDENT: Sinclair H. Hitchings '54, who has been named a Senior Fellow for next year, wrote last month's Alumni Fund mailing piece on behalf of the students now holding scholarships.
