The Undergraduate Chair
THE American press has already noted and the public will doubtless long remember political 1968 as the year of alienation for American college students. It was, popular history will record, the year they chose to sit the election out, to watch bemusedly as two uninspiring candidates fought their private battle for political control of the presidency.
It is fashionable, and somewhat unavoidable, for the pundits to separate the political world into two categories: college students, and others. To a certain extent it is justified in parts of the world. In the United States, it is wholly misleading.
There is, to be sure, a vocal minority of college students in open conflict with the rest of American society. These are the visible students: they usually control college newspapers and radio stations, they take control of student government and they tend to be the most articulate among their contemporaries. It has been argued, though never proven, that they are also the most intelligent, the most creative and the most dangerous.
They are not the most numerous.
CONSERVATIVE HANDS
At Dartmouth, they aren't even in control. The Dartmouth and WDCR remain firmly in conservative hands, primarily because of the. difficulties of paying their own way through advertising revenue in the stagnant Upper Valley market. Student government has been largely repudiated; in any event it is shifting into more conservative hands as the more talented students go elsewhere.
More to the point, while there was substantial support for McCarthy on campus, there was equally strong support for Rockefeller and Kennedy and even Nixon and Humphrey. As partisan feelings all over the nation strengthened in the week prior to the election, Dartmouth undergraduates seemed more and more committed to one of the two major party candidates.
While there is no accurate information, Dartmouth's relative propensity for conservative Republicans seemed to continue this year with a good third of the undergraduate body supporting a Nixon victory, undoubtedly far above the Ivy League average. If student opinion is radicalizing, there is little indication of it.
SHUNS SUPPORT
What indication of radical action there has been this year has weakened the movement. SDS, apparently afraid of its growing support among College students, issued a pamphlet entitled "The Elections Are a Hoax" the day before the election. Arguing against elections from the student government level on up to the Presidency, the brunt of the SDS attack seemed to be a pseudo-Marxist indictment of capitalism.
"On a national level," the SDS proclaimed, "the Trustees and their many equally powerful friends use the national elections to accomplish the same task [of masking control with pseudo-democracy]. The elections cover up the fact that big businessmen (like our Trustees) control the U.S. government and use it to serve their interests. Because rich businessmen and not the people control it, the government has always been more interested in using the carrot (liberalism) and the stick (right wing repression) to maintain a law and order that protects capitalist property ownership from social upheaval (like 'riots' and labor strikes) than in providing for the material and social needs of all Americans."
WALLACE-ITE ATTACKS
If most students would accept the view that business is more interested in profits than in progress, readers who got as far as the Wallace-ite attacks on the candidates (SDS claims they are all alike) and the mass media (which, though quoted liberally for exposing the candidates' fraudulent claims, are "loyal to the big businessmen who advertise") responded more with astonishment than sympathy.
Thus, "it should be clear to everyone that elections in this country are a hoax, just a means of pacifying us and containing our political activity within the limits of impotence. This is exactly what McCarthy tried to do to the young people in the anti-war movement who were growing more and more militant and anti-imperialist."
The prescription: "In order to end the war and prevent future U.S. aggression, we will have to form our own strong militant organization that is stronger than the big businessmen who now control the government, police and armed forces. This means hard day to day political organizing. It means, for instance, depending on masses of people rather than candidates who have to compromise their principles (if they ever had any) at every step. It means fighting the rich warmakers where they are weakest - for example on the campuses where ROTC can't exist if the students are determined to fight it - and not where they are strongest, as for example the electoral system ... as long as we have illusions about winning anything with elections that are stacked against us from top to bottom, we will lose."
On the less militant side, students were engaged last month in setting up a three-day Senior Symposium "focus" on "Our Changing Values," a concentrated diet of book discussions, panel discussions, speeches and receptions. The Senior Symposia program, successor to Great Issues' weekly speeches of another era, seemed to be defining itself as a catalyst for discussion rather than a well-endowed speakers bureau for the College.
Meanwhile, Houseparties, dismal under a slushy rain and snowfall, were ushered in by the traditional Friday-before-Houseparties WDCR-Dartmouth football game on the Green. Jumping the gun, however, The Dartmouth promoted the game on Friday's front page, then added: "For those who will be unable to attend ... a full account appears on Page 8 of this issue."
On page eight, as advertised, was word that The D's "Scribes" had smashed the "Tubes" 22-0, a full three hours before the game was scheduled to be played.
An open forum in the Top of the Hop concluded last month's three-day Focus onChanging Values sponsored by the Senior Symposia. Standing is panelist HilliardPaige, General Electric vice president and director of its aerospace division.
Robert Scheer, editor of Ramparts Magazine and one of the leading spokesmenfor the New Left, also was a guest panelist for the Focus on Changing Values.
