The Undergraduate Chair
By mid-March limping ex-skiers, and some blackened chunks of snow that once symbolized "Call to Carnival" were all that remained of winter. The campus has romped out of hibernation like a freshman on his first spree.
Fraternity men squeezed onto the Little Theater stage for round after round of the annual play contest. The winning formula proved to be hard work on scripts by the masters - Saroyan's Hello OutThere (Chi Phi), Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream (Theta Delt), Noel Coward's Red Peppers (Zeta Psi), Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo (Alpha Theta). The prize-winning original, uniquely, was an SAE musical titled AVery Pious Man.
Debaters, in their busiest season ever, packed off to Brookiyn, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Hofstra, UVM, St. Michael's and St. Lawrence. Meantime 45 DCUers joined a conclave at East Northfield to hear M. M. Thomas, author and staff secretary of the World Student Christian Federation, to talk and to dance to the strains of the DCU hoedown band.
Visiting speakers abounded. Biggest celebrities were V. K. Krishna Menon, India's delegate to the United Nations, who loosed his acid repartee on government classes, Great Issues, and the flock trailing him to Dartmouth House and the Snack Bar; and Barbara Ward, author and London Economist editor. An Exeter academician lectured on "K2 Unconquered," the unsealed Pakistani peak which is second only to Mt. Everest's 29,000-foot altitude. Young Republicans brought in Wesley Powell, New Hampshire Senatorial candidate. The Psychology Club squared off Professors Garfinckel (Government), Gutman (Sociology), Gibb (Psychology) and Wilson (Government) in a panel on "Psychology and Politics."
The Dartmouth's new directorate, fortified by steaks and speeches, greeted readers with the kick-off of the College Chest fund drive, a Droodle-drawing contest (black-sheep kin to the Rorscharch ink blot) and sage observations on schlump. The editors shortly launched on a globetrotting expedition, scolding Indians on Korea, Western Hemisphere foreign ministers on Communism and poverty, White House savants on New England's depression, Europeans on the Saar, students on not much. But it's always rocky at the beginning.
The annual Band Variety Night proved more circus than musicale. After the Barbary Coast, the College Band and the Injunaires were out of the way, spectators were treated to "Benson's Trained Monkeys" followed by (and not unidentical with) a tag wrestling match. Climax of the evening was Tom Lehrer, Harvard's nuclear physicist turned Hoagy Carmichael, who croaked through : "Fight Fiercely Harvard," "The Old Dope Peddler," "The Land of the AEC" ("...and of course I'll wear a pair o' Levis over my lead BVD's"), and like ditties. Two nights later an Oxford University Fellow discussed "T. S. Eliot and Contemporary Drama."
And the Undergraduate Council sponsored a new referendum on fraternity discrimination.
It was four years ago this spring that students overwhelmingly picked the second of these three alternatives for coping with the now-infamous "clauses":
1. Abolish the clauses or disaffiliate;
2. Do everything to get rid of the clauses short of disaffiliation;
3. Ignore the whole thing.
Since then each house with a written clause has fought hard, by letter and by personal appeal, to convince officers and chapter-brothers that there should be no bars on account of color and/or creed. They won some support, but mostly they won reputations as troublemakers. In one instance the president of the Interfraternity Council was publicly called a Communist. One national replaced written bigotry with an unwritten "understanding"; another national kicked out its Dartmouth chapter. The campaign just about petered out, for the "other side" has had the edge, knowing that Dartmouth chapters would squawk loud but not necessarily act.
The new referendum rewrote Alternative One by setting a specific deadline. In effect it asked: Shall we get rid of the clauses by April 1, i960 or make the offending houses go local?
Those who voted for Alternative One were of two minds: there were men who wanted to go local anyway, figuring $15,000 a year is too high a price for national affiliation; on the other hand, there were men who wanted to stay national, but were gambling that the threat of disaffiliation might be enough to jar the nationals loose sometime in the next six years.
Sixteen fraternity presidents out of 22 went on record against Alternative One. The referendum has been held, but the results came in after press time.
Seniors are finding it kind of tough to focus on fraternity problems. The issues are important, but external, while 74 days from this April Fool's stands Commencement - "the beginning."
If this correspondent can presume to speak for 565-odd men, we are staring from all sides at a fascinating fact: we don't know what comes next. Yesterday we matriculated, and plunged into a lively routine; we knew what comes next. Today our parents say it's time we got off the payroll, and we tend to agree.
The problem we face is the perennial one. We want to control our own futures, so we have some delicate choices to make - about graduate school, a job, military service, marriage, travel. But we don't know just what we want our futures to be like. We don't want to copy the conformists, the plodders, the cookie-pushers; liberal education is all about becoming self-propelled. So what do you do about it?
Strange sounds come out of the bull sessions - "... our trainee program" ... fifty a week and steady advancement... med school, internship, residency . .. FE-comm ... halfcarat. ... The ROTC boys are quiet and rather smug. They get commissions and better-than-business pay, and they don't have to bother about what comes next. But they are spilling out three years.
Not even the draft boards know how many men will be called up, nor who. Is it better to volunteer, to "get it over with"? Or should we "take our chances"? For grad school aspirants military service means GI bill, but it may mean permanent digression; waiting may mean being a Pvt. with a Ph.D., or it may mean a direct commission, or there might be no draft at all, two-three years hence.
As for marriage, dozens of seniors are reeling on the brink. The bonds of holy matrimony look golden to them, but they still look like bonds.
At this moment, with "the beginning" 74 days away, the occupant of The Chair thinks, all at the same time, he would like to be married but free, more liberally educated but starting to carve his niche, a lawyer but suspicious this is a cover-up for security, a teacher but not a pauper, a politician but a free man, a civil servant but not a timeclock-puncher, a journalist but not a hack, independent but taken care of, a man but what is that?
And the song says "Safe at last in the wide, wide world"!
Questions from the audience came thick and fast after Mr. Murphy s talk.
DEBATING CHAMPS: Thomas L. Waddell '55 (left) of Beaver, Pa., and Joel L. Wertheim '54 of Miami, Fla., who won Boston University's eighth national invitational debate tournament in late February. In triumphing over 32 other teams, they took the negative on the question of a free trade policy for the U. S. Dartmouth's debaters this year have won 18 out of 20 matches. On March 25-27 Dartmouth was host to 33 teams from New York and New England in a regional tournament to select five teams to go to the national competition at West Point, April 21-24.
