Speak Softly

Time was that each and every Dartmouth senior was required to deliver an oration at Commencement - the number once reached a numbing 49 - and Wednesday declamations in chapel, assigned by class, were a must. The College's traditional emphasis on rhetoric reputedly prompted General William Tecumseh. Sherman, after a glut of speeches at the Centennial exercises, to amend his "War is Hell!" proclamation to include Dartmouth graduations.

But time, long since run out on the curricular prominence given oratory, seems about to bring an end to the 50-yearold Department of Speech as a formal entity. Successively, an ad hoc review committee, the Humanities Divisional Council, and the faculty have recommended the abolition of the department, effective June 1980, but continued support of public speaking more or less at current level. The Forensic Union and debate activities will not be affected.

Until after a Trustee decision, matters peripheral to the abolition remain undecided - and will until specific recommendations are made and approved as to whether courses other than public speaking will be retained, in what form, and under what aegis; whether speech might have "program" status; whether Professor Herbert L. James, department chairman and Israel Evans Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres, will come under the umbrella of another discipline.

Fred Berthold Jr. '45, professor of religion and associate dean of the faculty for humanities, predicts that what will remain would be "basically one course, public speaking" in close to the number of sections now taught. James concedes that the curriculum would be drastically curtailed and that concentration would be on public speaking. Scattering other courses to other departments is not part of the recommendation, Berthold said, but "if English or Drama or somebody felt the need of it, they could conceivably do something like that."

James could simply remain professor of speech without a department, Berthold said, and James himself would prefer to float, unless it meant that students could not get distributive credit for speech courses. Given his choice of departments, he would opt for affiliation with Education.

At the College since 1949, James is the only tenured member of the department. The speech faculty would probably drop from the current equivalent of 3.5 members (counting part-time assignments) to two. The decrease will come from attrition, not dismissal.

According to James, the teaching staff will have its hands full in the fall, regardless. "We already have a massive waiting list for the courses we now offer, and the freshmen aren't even here yet."