Commencement Celebrity

THEODOR HEUSS, President of the West German Republic, who is paying a state visit to this country in June, will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree at Dartmouth's commencement ceremonies. President Heuss has been an editor, educator and author, and has been called the "father of the Bonn Constitution." When the new German government was formed in 1949, he was elected the first president of the Republic and was re-elected in 1954.

President Heuss attended the Universities of Munich and Berlin and received his doctorate in political science in 1905. After completing his studies, he edited Hilfe and the Neckar Zeitung, the leading political journal of the period. During the days of the Weimar Republic he was a professor at Berlin's Academy for Political Science and represented the Democratic Party in the Reichstag. When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, they dismissed him from the Academy and publicly burned two of his books, but he continued to write under an assumed name. After the German capitulation in 1945, his advice was frequently sought by the United States Military Government and in 1948 he became Chairman of the Free Democratic Party of West Germany.

He is not scheduled to deliver a formal address during the graduation ceremonies, but he has been invited to make some informal remarks to the graduating class if he so desires.

President Heuss's appearance will add still more to the cosmopolitan flavor of the 1958 Dartmouth commencement, at which a Korean student, Jaegwon Kim '58, will deliver the valedictory address on behalf of the graduating class. Though he had studied written English for a number of years at Seoul National University in Korea, Kim had practically never spoken it before coming to Dartmouth as a sophomore three years ago. Concentrating on philosophy courses, he had difficulty the first year understanding the lecturers and received "merely B's" in two of his five courses. He then enrolled in a special English section for foreign students and completed his final two years with a straight-A average.

Kim will go to Princeton next year on a Dartmouth fellowship for graduate study in philosophy. He hopes to teach for a few years in the United States before returning to his native Korea.