JOHN W. FINCH

William R. Kenan Professor of Drama

To John W. Finch - playwright, poet,literary critic, and teacher extraordinary- teaching and learning are best accomplished through involvement. And, bythat measure, Professor Finch has beentotally involved at Dartmouth for nearly35 years, teaching English and drama withthe kind of effectiveness that earned himappointment in 1968 as the first incumbentof the William R. Kenan Professorship,given in recognition of distinguished teaching in English.

In the process, probing continually for better ways to teach perceived needs in swiftly changing times - or, to state his concern in another way, to help bright young minds learn through both mind and emotion, enhancing both competence and conscience - he has helped to shape in some important ways the institution which has become an integral part of him.

In background, he has experienced deeply the events of his time. A native of New-burgh, N.Y., Professor Finch was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan University in 1933 in the depth of the Great Depression. A couple of years of odd jobs followed as he souight to raise money to continue his education. He finally began his academic career as an instructor and tutor of English at Harvard University in 1935 while also undertaking graduate work there. He joined the Dartmouth mouth faculty as Instructor in English in 1939, the year before he received a master's degree from Harvard. He achieved the rank of professor in 1953.

Increasingly, his interest within the English department shifted from the more introspective literary forms of poetry and the novel to drama as the pervasive vehicle of human communication since and before the Golden Age of Greece. Thus, after serving ving as chairman of the English department from 1957 to 1963, he led the successful campaign against stiff resistance to create a separate Department of Drama; and in 1967 he was named that new group's founding chairman in what he regards as a watershed decision which has made the arts an integral and living part of a Dartmouth liberal arts education.

The following year, he was also tapped to chair the Humanities Division for one year, a position enabling him to reinforce implementation of plans and programs advanced by the ad hoc faculty committee he chaired charged with developing new oportunities in general education.

As part of his total immersion while teaching and handling a heavy share of faculty administrative chores at Dartmouth, Professor Finch has also found time to write three published plays and has a fourth play figuratively in one typewriter and a book on writing in another typewriter.

One of these plays, The WanhopeBuilding (1947), made it to Broadway and was produced elsewhere in this country and abroad. Another, The DownstairsDragon (1954), a fanciful comedy about the problem of living with a dragon in the cellar, has been produced at Dartmouth, New Haven, Washington, and on the West Coast, while his most recent work, TheWinner (1963), a mix of who-dun-it and morality play, was one of the first dramas presented at the Hopkins Center during its first year of operation ten years ago.

In between times, although emotionally and esthetically centering his life in Dartmouth, Professor Finch has kept a world view through his scholarship and teaching. For instance, in 1948, he taught American literature at the Salzburg (Austria) Seminar in American Studies and served during 1949-50 as executive director of that seminar on leave from Dartmouth. And this spring, he spent the time between terms on a visit to Moscow and Leningrad in an intensive survey of Russian theater. That journey, made possible in part by supporting funds of the Kenan professorship, fulfilled a long-time dream of visiting the Chekhov Museum and the Moscow Art Theater, which presented as its first success Chekhov's play, TheSeagull, and which since has adopted the seagull as its symbol.

If enjoyment in a job could be measured by its continuing quality of vitality and tension, then Professor Finch enjoys his "work" as teacher to the hilt. To him, today's undergraduates, for instance, "are more exciting than any previous generation except perhaps for the veterans after World War II."

Sitting in his cavernous office in Bartlett Hall, surrounded by posters of plays presented at Dartmouth, his deep voice takes on a timbre of enthusiasm as he talks about the refreshing combination of "independence of mind and naivete" he finds in the current undergraduate.

He says he finds them not necessarily smarter or knowing more - "they just know different things" - but their attitude of challenge to our present culture "makes them particularly exciting."

As a drama teacher, he also is gratified by the way young people today "really want to learn by doing." "They're no longer satisfied to study a play on the page as merely a literary document," he explains. "They feel - and I agree - that the way to learn about a play is to do it, whether in informal readings in class or as a full production on stage."

The trend is also apparent, he pointed out, in the popularity of such other action, or doing, courses, as in the dance and art. And, in the dance courses, which he supported as an extension of drama, the students are not "alienated freaky types," he says, but hockey and football players and pre-med students who see in dance a

"means of communication" and another way of learning that involves the body in a reinforcement of learning of the mind. He pointed out that until Victorian concepts introduced the dualism of mind and body, the dance was an accepted part of the education of the citizen or prince.

Although he spearheaded the movement to create a drama department, which in turn helped others enlarge horizons in the other arts, Professor Finch gives primary credit for the changes to the construction of the Hopkins Center.

"The thing that made the drama department possible," he says, "is the Hopkins Center. I can see now that the College made a bigger commitment than it realized when it put this magnificent facility in the middle of the campus.

"There's a human insistence on drama that is at once inexorable and exciting," Professor Finch said. He said it was the central mode for projecting ideas and asserting social force during such vital eras as the classic age of Greece and the Renaissance. He said drama is often utilized spontaneously, as by survivors of the Nazi concentration camps who used plays to give reality to their survival and to work their way back to normalcy. Professor Finch said he even found in a whaling ship log, now in the Nantucket Museum, an account of a production of Othello on deck while the vessel was caught in doldrums in the South Pacific.

And for Professor Finch, drama continues to provide him a vibrant vehicle for both teaching and expressing ideas having impact and nourishing a civilization - in keeping with the highest expectations of the late William R. Kenan, chemist and Florida industrialist who set up the charitable trust in his name to stimulate improvement in undergraduate education.