THE UNDERGRADUATE CHAIR
RARELY does an undergraduate possess a mature enough viewpoint to evaluate his own achievements accurately. Yet most of the student body would agree that Ronald F. Kehoe '59, general manager of WDCR, did just that, and more, in his farewell address at the radio station's first anniversary banquet.
After dinner at the Hovey Grill on March 4, and after speeches by President Dickey and Matthew J. Culligan, executive vice president in charge of radio networks for NBC, Ron took the floor to speak both idealistically and practically.
During the past year he, more than any other single student, has had to become a cool, hard-headed, responsible businessman. The radio station was remodeled extensively (it is located on the top floor of Robinson Hall), and $25,000 was spent by the College on new equipment to increase its range and power. Now that the station serves the Hanover-Lebanon-White River Junction area as a full-scale commercial concern (its advertising rates have gone up), it has become influential in the lives of perhaps twenty thousand people. Naturally, the station is now under practical pressure to operate efficiently, and the burden of that pressure has been taken by Ron. His administration of it, his apportioning of the manifold responsibilities to the undergraduates he has worked with, has been most successful. The day of the banquet he was able to present President Dickey with a check for $1,000, the station's first payment on its College loan. This was amazing to those men in the College concerned with the loan, because, with the many difficulties encountered while the station was in its change-over period from WDBS to WDCR, no one had even thought of repayment until two or possibly three years from now. Thus, eminently successful at management and coordination, Ron could deliver his address with the ingrained habit of making thoughtful, realistic appraisals of the station's role as one of the area's mass media.
But he did not speak solely of practical matters. Rather, in the main, he set forth the basic principles or ideals by which he and his co-workers have operated the station. Doubtless they had them clearly in mind during most of their waking hours to have run the station so efficiently. And certainly it was heartening to hear those ideals stated succinctly and with the strength of conviction Ron has. We set them down again below, not to try to make him out to be the paragon of the collegiate leader - he is the first to admit his mistakes - but because his address seems to speak for many of those undergraduates who favor independence in learning. And as his remarks are made from his own personal point of view, one might almost think he had something of the professor about him, because he is mellow and tolerant (to a degree) of callow youth's excesses. His incorporation of youth's failures and mistakes into a productive framework which turns them to good account — into an education about aspects of life undergraduates are sure to meet later on - most surely be-speaks a wisdom rarely found at the age of twenty-two. But let him speak for himself:
"Mr. Culligan, President Dickey, guests, and friends. As I look back in my memory over the past year, I find myself wondering, like you, exactly what it is that has made WDCR the going concern that it most certainly has become. In answer, I can only give you the insights that three and a half years of participation furnish me.
"I would say that Dartmouth College Radio excels in two fundamental areas. We are truly unique among the campus and the professional broadcasters of America because we uniquely combine the finest assets of the two. We command the imaginative resources of youth and the techniques of the professionals, and I hope our distinguished guest won't quarrel with me on the last point.
"WDCR is at its very finest for being a curious and wonderful mixture of imagination and technique. Imagination has been largely responsible for WDCR's dramatic emergence into a thrilling new dimension of campus and community prestige. Through a battery of new programs, and more importantly, of new program concepts, we have moved into the virgin territory of the public issue. To be sure, we have moved both boldly and decisively, with a vigor that brings dismay to the minds of some.
"But the vitality and the displeasure it often calls forth, are precisely the essence of whatever it is that makes WDCR a worthwhile undertaking. For this enterprise of ours is worthwhile only insofar as it contributes to the learning process that has its focus in the curriculum of Dartmouth College. Independence, or self-dependence, is central to any situation" that involves real learning. The challenge to learn that WDCR presents to each and every single one of us comes from the realization that there is no one around to compensate for the mistakes. There is, so to speak, no one to pick up the pieces after us.
"The station is only what we can make of it by depending upon and exploiting our own resources as men with a job to do. The challenge to our imaginative capacities is unlimited in every area of our collective endeavor. Dartmouth College has ventured far out onto the limb of risk to give us a precious and peculiar opportunity to learn by doing for ourselves. But the implications of this freedom that the College has be-stowed upon us are many indeed.
"We hear a great deal of talk these days about responsibility. Few, if any, of the preachers of responsibility have taken the trouble to define the term. How are we to be responsible, and to whom? I suspect that most of those who would have us be more "responsible" mean by this that we must be conservative and careful. And to a certain extent, of course, they are right. Running an outlet of mass communication does not involve a licensing of one's whims. But, when this distinction has been made, we will plead for the right to be wrong. We ask for patience when we commit excesses, or what seem to be excesses from another man's perspective. For we shall be wrong, and we shall go too far now and then. But I submit that mistakes are the teachers of young men, and it is by error that we learn most truly. I feel that there is precious little to be learned from faultless innocence. The price to be paid for this self-dependent learning of ours is often very high. But I suspect that the discomfort and annoyance that are the offspring of our overly zealous application are not to be compared to the educational fruits we can gain thereby.
"Those who want a mild and pleasant, always 'responsible' station in this community would have us mature before our
time. We cannot in conscience sacrifice vitality and daring for a reactionary politeness. We demand to be young. We must insist on the precious, paradoxical freedom to learn by having the leeway to abuse our freedoms.
"We have our own concept of responsibility. Under it, we believe that the free man's ultimate responsibility is to preserve his very freedom, to protect it as something sacred from the well-meaning control of those who would have a more orderly world ... but a world that is less free for being more orderly. In that everlasting conflict between freedom and responsibility we take the stand, in a complex situation presenting multiple responsibilities, that our profoundest duty is to ourselves, and to the higher needs of this College.
"If it should ever come about that WDCR by its vigor and its daring should be deprived of the life-giving freedom to go astray, then on that day WDCR will end as an educational enterprise. And unless it is educational, it has no right to exist in a liberal arts institution such as Dartmouth College. Once the station loses the opportunity to be guilty of error and indiscretion," it will have lost the central factor of its worth. Like an old man who has lost the will to live and to improve himself by living, WDCR on that sad day will be no more than a very sad sham.
"Truly, this has been one of the most rewarding years of our young lives, and I cannot resist this public opportunity to tender my very deepest personal thanks to the three men who have done most of anyone to imprint the experiences and associations of this year on my memory. Ariel Halpern, Bob Johnson, Jon Cohen ... along with myself these three men have enjoyed a year of remarkable cooperation and interaction as a cohesive group of men working together in a common purpose. As one man we have triumphed ... as one man we have failed ... but in either case, it was always as one man...."
As we've said, such a point of view is rare indeed, and should be cherished and preserved, not just by WDCR, but by all of Dartmouth's student organizations.
