Letters to the Editor

The Sexes

TO THE EDITOR:

H. S. Guernsey's letter in the December issue makes it obvious that coeducation means different things to different people. We would like to offer an alternative to his view.

Perhaps it is true that the rectification of "past inequities in educational opportunities" can be facilitated through coeducation, but this is not its main purpose. Despite the wonders of "rapid communication and transportation," the point of coeducation is neither to mix the sexes for a weekend nor to enliven Dartmouth for the benefit of men. Rather, the core of coeducation is the recognition of individuals as people first and not as men or women, blacks or whites, etc.

We support Mr. Guernsey's statement on "our democratic concepts" and firmly hope, as he does, that the "worth of the individual" will, indeed, prevail.

We can say with certainty that our worth as individuals has been enhanced through Dartmouth. We are now people with an increased capacity to contribute to the College and to society.

Hanover, N.H.

TO THE EDITOR:

Some recent letters to the A LUMNIMAGAZINE have expressed the view that the only reason for opposing coeducation is sheer reactionary sexism. Not so. One result of imposing admissions qualifications with respect to age, sex, and "virtue" (in the Renaissance sense) was that a strong sense of group identity and cohesiveness was fostered. This provided both moral support for students and role models that emphasized initiative, resourcefulness, and a critical open-mindedness. The group an individual identifies with is especially significant during the college years, when his roles, beliefs, and values are in flux, and the very wealth of opportunities (and burden of expectations) challenge his capacity to act. The Dartmouth student has traditionally been able to fortify his rather impressionable personality by incorporating the socially honored norms of "the Dartmouth man."

When group identity ,is diluted — either by simple increase in number or by introduction of new elements — group identification is weakened, and thereby the individuals it benefited. I noticed this at a state university I attended. Amidst its cross-section of the American public, any notion of a "State man" could hardly arise. Public behavior tended to be passive and anonymous, or desperately bizarre. The posturing and play-acting Dartmouth students engage in so freely and which teaches them the behavior to lead in adult society was absent. Dartmouth's colorful and instructive conformism was exchanged for a cliquish and cautious compartmentalization. (The larger and more diverse your audience, the more nerve it takes to bring off your role.)

Our century's urge to merge has simply caused the urge to differentiate to pop up in different places. The obession with contest sports at American universities was triggered largely by the visibility of women on their campuses; males felt obliged to seek out an arena to prove their masculinity. Individuality feeds on distinctions, and non-recognition of these distinctions has led to the rise of the modern "man without qualities."

While negligibly increasing quality, full coeducation will decrease Dartmouth's sense of uniqueness, and encourage separatist tendencies in the student body. The honor principle will be further eroded by the dilution of group loyalty. (Already, loyalty is shifting to more tightly knit subgroups such as athletic teams, fraternities, extra-curricular activities, ethnic associations, and feminist circles.) Undergraduate scholarship, to the degree that students perceive it as a function of their membership in the comprehensive group and not as a function of their major subject interest, will play a diminished role with respect to the socially more reinforcing but intellectually less broadening affiliations mentioned above. This process is already evident.

West Berlin, Germany

Dissent in the Family

TO THE EDITOR:

Pam Brewer is not my sister nor are her male classmates my brothers. They are fellow alumni/ae — period. The December cover, contents page, and lead line over A. Kelley Fead's story on page 22 all mention "sister"; interestingly, nowhere in Fead's article describing alumnae responses to a questionnaire is there any use of the word "sister."

It is therefore apparent that one or more editors wants to convert our Fellowship (which sounds somewhat exclusive, i.e., all of us alumni/ae) into a Brotherhood (which makes me think of Teamsters or Trainmen — not at all exclusive).

Orinda, Calif.

How Now?

TO THE EDITOR:

After your article on Nelson Rockefeller following his confirmation as Vice President, I wrote you a letter, the gist of which was that I, as a Dartmouth alumnus, would feel the same sense of pride you obviously felt, only when Nelson Rockefeller was repudiated.

By return mail you advised that you had tentatively decided to accept my letter (equal time, etc.) on the condition that I submit for your further review the sources of information on the allegations I had made. Unwilling to spend the time on a lengthy memorandum in support of my letter (much of what was in the letter, I got from the New York Times, for God's sake!) I let the matter drop, and my letter was never Printed.

And so, for the past two years we have had nothing from your magazine in the way of balance. At least where Rocky is concerned. Not after the racial remark with the Liberian and Senator Brooke, and not even when our Vice President was picking fights and waving around a disconnected telephone at the Republican National Convention.

Yesterday I came across the enclosed clipping in Newsweek magazine [showing the Vice President gesticulating to a crowd in Buffalo] and what I want to know is, how do you like your blue-eyed boy, mister editor?

Hartford, Conn.

Vox

TO THE EDITOR:

The diatribe by Stephen D. Hayes '66 titled "Namecalling" on the last page of the December issue deserves a reply.

His insistence that we substitute "Aspect" for "Department" impresses me as a useless exercise in semantics. I am reminded of the increasing trend to adapt the popular term of "System" to apply to almost anything.

What is so wrong with the present terminology and its interpretations?

I am reminded of an experience some years ago when asked to testify, if necessary, at a press conference called by Henry Wallace, when he was Secretary of Agriculture — and that wasn't yesterday. So, I boned up on the reasons behind the tragic forest fire losses in the Blackwater Fire in the Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming. I wanted to be ready to explain why and how such a loss of life could occur without human negligence.

But my concern was all in vain because the Secretary chose that occasion to announce that he was changing the name of the ill-fated "Resettlement Administration" of New Deal days to the "Farm Security Administration." He really seemed to feel that substituting the word "Security" would cancel out all the shortcomings of the past.

And so it could be with "Aspects" because action rather than words usually determines results.

Hanover, N.H.

TO THE EDITOR:

First the good news: Congratulations on the December issue. It is one of the finest you have published since I have been a reader. Not only because of the more creative and lively use of photography (the color telephotograph on the cover is sensational!) but the upbeat article on fashion causes this edition to transcend the self-inflicted limitations of most alumni publications.

The bad news concerns the selection of Stephen Hayes's editorial (which you have every right to print) on "Namecalling." In this tour de force of bureaucratic double-speak we are asked to believe a pedagogical problem can be solved by mislabeling it. The editorial suggests we exchange the term "department" for "aspect" so that the history department will now become known as the "history aspect." This "definition Dynamics" would facilitate viewing the "inter-disciplinary approach of post-secondary education."

One of the curses of modern education is that it no longer teaches the difference between style and substance. Thus a literately composed piece of nonsense, such as Mr. Hayes's article, finds its way to the editorial section of this magazine. Did the editor check only for proper grammar and the requisite number of buzz words? One seriously wonders.

The first purpose of education is to teach the fundamentals of learning. This means the ability to write and speak in clear, concise English; to utilize mathematics to solve common problems; and to understand to some degree how mankind orders his existence. After that one may proceed to learn the fundamentals of other subjects, such as physics, music, tennis, etc.

Only after this first purpose has been achieved (and it rarely is) ought educators worry about the peripheral fads that have become such an aberrant pedagogical staple. True, this takes some of the glamor out of teaching English I at Dartmouth, but I still savor with pleasure my hatred for Sevrin Compton Duvall III, the English I instructor who refused to permit me to bamboozle him with freshman brilliance expressed in atrociously deficient English. He stuck to the fundamentals, and thereby forced me to examine them for the first time.

Relearning English by returning to the fundamentals not only taught me the proper construction of sentences and paragraphs; it exposed my nerves to the prodigious volume of claptrap which passes as serious thought. But it is not fair that Mr. Hayes's article bear the full brunt of this complaint. .

Blame should be shared equally by the Curriculum Selection Aspect of the college of which he and I are products. If after 16 years of education Johnny still can't write sensibly, it is a change in their substance that might help, not a change of their name.

Lexington, Mass.

Education's Worth

TO THE EDITOR:

John Kemeny's excerpted remarks which appeared in the November issue smack of the self-righteous rhetoric college administrators engage in when one dares to imply that a college education's economic value has declined.

Based upon the laws of supply and demand and the demographics of the United States labor supply, it is pretty hard not to believe that the return on a college education has declined over the last ten years. It is amusing that Mr. Kemeny, a pioneer in the application of sophisticated mathematical techniques to social science problems, should protest the very methods his textbooks promote. Many of the assumptions employed in mathematical models purporting to describe physical phenomena are as unrealistic as the ones used in the articles alluded to by Mr. Kemeny.

Aside from the innocuous question or whether a college education is worth as much as it used to be, or whether the educational experience imparted by an institution such as Dartmouth College can be measured, the galling aspect of his article is the way he downplays the importance of making a lot of money as a result of your education. It does seem to be important. At least a casual reading of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE reinforces this impression since column upon column is devoted to those alumni who have ascended the corporate ladder the fastest. It is fitting that Kemeny's article appears in an issue which has a cover extolling the fact that a recent graduate has landed a job with a prestigious investment banking firm.

The best riposte to those who denigrate the economic value of a college education is: So what!

Chicago, Ill.

TO THE EDITOR:

An advertisement I saw recently for a Senior Internal Auditor at the College bothered me both as a Tuck School graduate and as chairman of Business Administration at Colby, my undergraduate college, which offers no major in business specialties. It was particularly distressing in the light of the concern of such people as President Kemeny with the future of the liberal arts education. The requirements for the job include a B.S. in accounting — nonsense. This would rule out the prospect who had graduated from Colby (or even Dartmouth) with a major in economics and then from Tuck.

In his place, your Manager of Employment would find acceptable a graduate of Thomas College. Husson College, the College of Business Administration at a state university, etc. I am afraid the latter group would find themselves a bit out of place in Hanover and possibly considered second-class citizens by many of the faculty members with whom they deal. Certainly the three years of auditing experience, stated as an additional requirement, is enough to indicate competence.

Falmouth, Maine

Colorful Phrases

TO THE EDITOR:

Certainly if purple prose belongs anywhere it's in an obituary column.

Thus I read in one of your December obituaries: "As a wealthy man, Doug was once kidnapped and held for ransom but escaped by a ruse. At another time he was guest at a Chicago party taken over by a hold-up gang which finally lost out to police pressure and police guns."

If I were to list every "Chicago party" I attended that was taken over by a hold-up gang, your readers would realize such an event is not unique enough to merit inclusion in anyone's obituary. Nowadays Chicago newspapers merely have a simple "Chicago Party" box on the society page, giving name and address of the host, number of guests, number in the hold-up party, and whether or not police pressure and guns arrived in time.

(It may interest students of the language to know that since 1968 some have felt the use of police pressure alone — without police guns — may quality any event as a "Chicago party.")

But the real point of my letter is to lament the passing of such colorful phrases. For just like "Wah-Hoo-Wah," the words "Chicago party" release a pell-mell of cultural prejudices which are no longer acceptable in American society.

We Chicagoans will keep throwing them, but we (and the rest of the country) will have to start calling them something else.

Chicago, Ill.

Bouchard

TO THE EDITOR:

Dartmouth has reason to be grateful to its retiring and unique photo-phenomenon, Adrian Bouchard. I appreciate all the more what he has done for Dartmouth because I've been a maniacal photographer all my life, and earned my living from photography ever since graduation. And in the intervening years I've seen all too many "in house" photographers defeated and grow slack, their mechanisms run down or their mainsprings broken after the 10,000th shot of the boss presenting a citation or a loving cup. Not so with Bouchard. Over the years, despite a job entailing much boring and impossible-to- make-interesting photography, his eye has kept ever bright. He has found fresh subjects or fresh attractions in old ones. It needed a special heart to keep seeing and to keep photographing with warmth and originality, and Bouchard had that heart. All bright blessings on his shutter finger.

Thetford, Vt.

Highlights

TO THE EDITOR:

I would like to thank those people who took the trouble to view my paintings and drawings that were exhibited during Alumni College last summer. I want to especially thank those who bought the pictures. It made the long trek from southern Florida more rewarding. I would also like to thank the four main speakers during Alumni College, professors Epperson, Dorris, Elliott, and Udy, for the brain stimulation that alumni who have been a long time from the educational scene need and should have in the complex world of today.

The proximity of Dartmouth students and their gracious hosting of alumni and visitors were highlights of Alumni College.

Palm Beach, Fla.

The Symbol (cont.)

TO THE EDITOR:

Those of the administration who encouraged the Glee Club to remove "Eleazar Wheelock" from its repertoire should now join the Glee Club to form a "scaling team." No "do, re me's," but scale Baker Library tower and remove that offensive rum barrel and what appears to be an Indian from the weather vane.

To what lengths will we be led?

Jamesburg, N.J.

TO THE EDITOR:

As a wife and mother of Dartmouth men and former resident of Hanover, I can no longer remain silent about the fast disappearing wonderful traditions of the College. First to go were certain clauses governing fraternity membership, but do you not have other segregated clubs now? Next was the grand old cheer "Wah-Hoo-Wah" led by those wonderful Indian braves and our own Chief Sundown who far outshone John Harvard. We were proud of our Indian heritage! Now I read that the Glee Club no longer sings of Eleazar Wheelock and it is whispered that the beautiful murals in Hovey Grill may disappear.

For the first 30 years of my Dartmouth life I was proud to be a member of the Indian college family.

Is it not the younger generation that is looking for, and hoping to find, bigotry in traditions of which we were proud? We of the older generation strive to understand their life style and bridge the gap. Is it not now time for them to do a little research in order to understand the true meaning of these traditions before the distinction of being a Dartmouth grad has become extinct?

Wilton, N.H.

The ALUMNI MAGAZINE welcomes comment from its readers. For publication, letters should be signed and addressed specifically to the Magazine (not copies of communications to other organizations or individuals). Letters exceeding 400 words in length will be condensed by the editors.