President Addresses College
DISCUSSES SOCIAL CHANGES AND AIMS OF LIBERAL EDUCATIONAT CONVOCATION EXERCISES OPENING 169TH YEAR
REPEATING the informality of last year's opening address, President Hopkins spoke extemporaneously to the undergraduates of the College at the convocation exercises starting Dartmouth's 169 th academic year on September 23. The first part of his talk reviewed briefly the changes in undergraduate social life which have been effected during the past year, while the second part, somewhat more formal, dealt with the background and purposes of the liberal arts college.
Packed into Webster Hall for the opening exercises were 680 freshmen, final selections from an application list of some 2300 young men from every section of the country, and the majority of the 1700 students enrolled this year in the three upper classes of the College. The faculty, in academic robes, occupied the stage along with the President and Deans.
In welcoming the freshmen and returning upperclassmen at the start of another college year, President Hopkins expressed sorrow that among those missing were two valued members of the faculty and five undergraduates who had died during the summer.
From this brief memorial he turned to a discussion of the three-fold program which he had announced at the start of the previous college year, dealing with the health service, the fraternities, and the upperclass dining hall. As far as could be ascertained from the health service records, President Hopkins declared, the first year of this new college policy had been even more auspicious than had been anticipated. "We have every reason to anticipate even better results in the year to come," he said. "Men sought out the advantages of the health service early, cases that might have become serious did not become serious
because preventive measures were taken in time. And again the College offers this year all that was offered last year and that margin more which experience has shown to be desirable."
With regard to the Dartmouth fraternity situation, President Hopkins asserted that gratifying progress had been made by the various chapters during the past year but that it was still altogether too early to declare what the eventual decision of the Trustees would be. "I promised in behalf of the Trustees," he said, "that every attempt would be made on the part of the official College to benefit the social organization of the College in the attempt to make the fraternities a more helpful influence in college life, helpful to themselves, helpful to the individual in the fraternities, and helpful to the college body as a whole. It is too early as yet to declare what is the final result of this effort, but here again we may state that definite results were secured, that the fraternities were revivified, that
there was an increased consciousness as to what fraternity life was all about, that there was a greater understanding that the man when he joined a fraternity assumed some responsibilities for his neighbor and became to some extent his brother's keeper, and that except as this was done, the fraternity life was futile and sterile. It is altogether too early to declare what will be the eventual decision of the Trustees in regard to the permanence of the fraternity life in the College, but we are gratified at the progress that has been made during the past year, and if that progress continues to be made, if the fraternities continue to be permeated with a sense of self-respect and self-importance and responsibility, why then they become active agencies for maintaining the life of the College and they themselves should be maintained."
Turning to Thayer Hall, the new upperclass dining center, as the third promise which had been fulfilled by the Trustees, President Hopkins declared that there had been no attempt to dictate to upperclassmen where they should eat and that there had likewise been no attempt to exclude all eating clubs from the village. The new hall, he stated, had been built by the College to answer "the need for something to be done to establish a standard, the need that there should be some action taken that would crowd out the poorer dining clubs of the village and should afford some basis of appraisal as to what constituted merit and desirability from the point of view of providing the undergraduate with adequate facilities." It is the intention of the College, he concluded, to maintain in Thayer Hall a club where there shall be provided the best of food, the best of service and the best of facilities compatible with the prices charged.
At this point President Hopkins dropped the discussion of campus problems and turned to one o£ his greatest concerns—tire liberal arts college and its place in the modern world.
"Chesterton," he began, "says somewhere in regard to Christianity that the comparative failure of Christianity to achieve its purposes is not due to the fact that Christianity has been tried and found difficult but is due to the fact that Christianity has been found difficult and never tried; and there is some analogy between that statement and the failure of education to do more than it has done in the civilization of the present day to conserve what the civilization of the past has accumulated and to carry this on in some measure to a greater and stronger and a more self-assured civilization than we have at the present time.
"Perhaps the first necessity—and certainly the necessity for a group such as is gathered here—if education is to become effective, is to understand something about what the particular instrument of education with which we are connected is, what Dartmouth College is, what a liberal college is, what its objectives are, what its ideals are, why its procedures exist, and what are the intricacies of motives which have led to the foundation and which at the present time lead to the maintenance of the institution which, in spite of attacks upon it—l am speaking of the American college system as a whole now—shows a vitality and strength greater than at any previous time."
In discussing what it is that education provides, President Hopkins explained that education gives one an acquaintanceship with the outside world and enables one to transcend the limitations of one's own mind. A man comes to understand himself more clearly and more definitely, he added, if he has understanding of the outside world, while the man who concentrates wholly on his own problems, unfulfilled wishes and repressions become both an intolerable bore and a nuisance to himself. A blend of objectivity and subjectivity is necessary for the normal human being, President Hopkins declared, and of these two objectivity is the more important. Nevertheless one of the things that ought to occur in the college course, he added, is that each man should come to know something about himself. This is perhaps more difficult in the American colleges than it is in the European universities, which withhold admission until a later period in a man's mental development and therefore deal more largely with men of maturity.
Of the fundamental purpose of a college course President Hopkins said: "There is a great movement of youth which has as its motto: 'Boys are born, men are made'; and perhaps the fundamental definition which could be given to the purposes of a college course is that in the college course the boy should find possible the making of a man of himself."
The President then went on to relate the anecdote of a member of the football squad to whom the coaches were giving particular attention one afternoon. The player was tense and nervous and did nearly everything wrong, and the coaches finally sent him to the showers. After the player had left the field, the coach turned to President Hopkins and said, "That boy will find himself some day, and when he does, he will be good." The next two seasons abundantly vindicated the opinion of the coach.
Upon the phrase "find himself" the President then discoursed for a short while, pointing out that when a man does something contemptible, people say that he has "lost himself" or that he is "beside himself," whereas if a man does something fine, generous or intelligent, people say that he has "found himself" or that he has "come to himself." The real man finds himself, President Hopkins reiterated, not solely through introspection and self-examination but by that transcending of his own limitations and by putting himself into contact with the thinking of the ages, which is a factor of education.
"It is in this objectivity on the one side and this subjectivity on the other that a man acquires an education and makes education effective for intelligence," the President said. "Now, as a matter of fact, intelligence and knowledge are two entirely different things, but knowledge ought to be a contributor to intelligence. It isn't always so. I have known men with very little learning who were highly intelligent and I have known men with a great deal of knowledge who were very unintelligent, but other things being equal, education makes for intelligence. And intelligence or understanding or wisdom, whatever term you wish to apply to it, is the factor that we most of all need in our present-day life."
President Hopkins went on to say that he took very great exception to the argument, found particularly in college publications, that the college career should be a participation in life. To his mind, he declared, he did not see why in the world of education and intelligence there should be any different principle than exists elsewhere in the world that one is better equipped for participation if he will take time to sit aside and learn something about that in which he is going to participate. In elaboration of this idea the President pointed to the practice followed by baseball and football coaches of keeping young players on the sidelines during the major part of their first years in order that they may see how the thing is done and establish their own theories and conceptions in regard to what constitutes the game. "And yet," President Hopkins added, "in so complicated and so involved a thing as life, where every year it requires more in the way of knowledge to get intelligence, there is always an uneasiness in an undergraduate body and the feeling that they ought to be out doing something about it even before they know anything about what the problems are or how they are to be met."
The President explained that he spoke of this point because the principle of the liberal college is against the idea that an early participation in life is advantageous to a man. "The liberal college," he stated, "is a free college, free for contemplation of life, free for instruction in regard to life. Occasionally a man comes to me in confusion and says that in some given department he finds two men representing absolutely contradictory points of views as instructors, and I usually tell him that that is probably an ideal department because it offers the man the arguments for a contrast of points of view and leaves the man free eventually for a decision himself as to what his own convictions should be in regard to the matter. Now the liberal college is hot interested at all in vocational training. That is one of the arguments that is frequently made against the liberal college, that it doesn't fit a man for anything. The liberal college, as a matter of fact, undertakes to give a man those common denominators of life, that blend of knowledge in regard to life which shall make him available for any position in life into which he may fall, but the liberal college is not interested primarily in many of the things that various other types of institutions are interested in. It isn't interested in making you a better banker, a better lawyer, a better doctor, a better minister, or a better teacher, except incidentally. Primarily it is interested in the mental enlargement which shall enable you to be a bigger man, wherever the path of life leads you, and the liberal college as a free college is the one institution in the world at the present time that emphasizes the necessity of holding to those principles which the Anglo-Saxon race began to establish when it first secured the consent of royalty to the Magna Charta, and in later centuries in the Bill of Rights, and later in the Petition of Rights. And so on through the ages there has been gradually established the principle that in Anglo-Saxon countries there shall be the right of assembly, the right of discussion, and the right of investigation, and those rights are denied in the educational systems of a large proportion of the countries of the world at the present time. And above and beyond anything else, the function of the liberal college is to preserve the sense of importance of those principles among its people and through acquiring that sense of importance to go out into the world and to make themselves apostles and disciples of the freedom and liberalism which are represented in principles such as these.
"As a matter of fact, throughout the period of your college course, in one way or another, in class room or outside, the College will seek to establish not only in your own minds as a theoretical objective but in your whole beings the conviction that the worthwhileness of these things is great enough so that they are worth any sacrifice or any struggle."
In drawing toward the close of his talk, President Hopkins referred to the advantages to be derived from the widespread geographical distribution of the student body and pointed out to the freshman class that the Selective Process and the restriction of enrollment placed an obligation upon the group as a class and as individuals.
"The College strives," he said, "to make itself effective, the College undertakes through its curriculum to offer to its men the best advantages possible, but it offers other advantages that are not to be ignored and are represented year by year in the freshman class, bringing their great representation from widely distributed areas. A man from the East can learn from a man from the West, and a man from the West can learn from a man from the East. And it is a great thing, as long as we as a people are as widely distributed as we are, that men should have the opportunity for companionship and friendship in as composite a group as that which represents the undergraduate college at Dartmouth.
"I want to reiterate to the freshmen a statement that I made last year that there is something of an obligation upon the class collectively and individually from the very fact that the College restricts its enrollment and undertakes to restrict it to an enrollment to which that it can give maximum advantage to, and that the College has refused to dilute its educational processes by going on into an expansion where each individual man would find less available to him than is available at the present time.
In closing, President Hopkins quoted a passage from Mallet's History of Oxford, substituting the word "Dartmouth" for the word "Oxford."
"Through all the changes, greater than the traditions gathered round her, wiser that the prejudices she has outgrown, saved constantly by the new blood ever flowing through her as strongly as the waters flow beneath her walls; still young in heart and ineffaceable in beauty, Dartmouth lives, sharing her treasures ungrudgingly with those who seek them, her spirit with those who understand."
THAYER HALL IN OPERATION AT THE OPENING OF COLLEGE The decision of the trustees to build and operate an upperclass dining center was announced by President Hopkins at the opening exercises of one year ago. When the 169 thyear of the College began last month (September 23) the undergraduates found this attractive, commodious and handsomely equipped building ready to serve them. (Main andside entrances shown above. The hall stretches back some distance, to the right of frontportion as shown here.)
