A One-Type College

In his admirable address at the opening of College, the President spoke as follows:

"I would revert again to the undergraduate life of the College and present for the consideration of men of the student body the conviction that here among us the influences are too much toward hammering out on the anvil of conventional sentiment 'a standardized type; Not that this tendency may not be too much present in American colleges in general, but our present concern is with Dartmouth life! Given common convictions against the cheap, the low, the unintelligent and the evil, the greater the variety of types and of attributes among Dartmouth men, the stronger the College will be. The evidence of the fault may be taken from less consequential things as well as from more. The presence of an additional button on the coat beyond that pictured in current tailor's advertisements, a variation in the height of the belted waist-line, a slight inaccurary in sighting the line of the part of the hair--any of these may as possible be a mark of independent thinking and presumable distinction as they may be an indication of moral turpitude or social outlawry. I submit this argument for the consideration of those undergraduate individuals and groups who for one reason or another are called upon to appraise their fellows." . . .

The truth of the matter is that we are intolerant. As individuals, as groups, and as a College, we are unwilling to appreciate, and perhaps even to understand, the opinions of others with whom we are out of sympathy. Blinded to our own faults, we pride ourselves that we are not as others--whom we variously describe as "wet" or "aesthetic" or with even harsher epithets. We are intolerant, and intolerance is the concomitant of conceit.

Let individuals, groups, and the College as a body, be not too hasty in passing judgment upon things perhaps not fully understood. When this is done, and when individuals can assume without danger of social ostracism the cloak of originality, Dartmouth can once more boast of its democracy and its far-sung spirit whose teachings we have too long neglected. The Dartmouth