THE PRESS

An ever present danger in so small a college town as Hanover is that the social development of the undergraduate will be neglected. With only half the college fraternally affiliated, it stands to reason that the associations and relationships of the other half are naturally of a more haphazard type. In cases where men have not been invited to join fraternities because of social or racial defects, this possibility becomes even more acute.

Since social intelligence, the ability to meet and to mingle with men is at least as important as any other single benefit to be derived from a college education, it seems postulated that the institution should make more than casual provision for the development of that ability. Exposure to social experience is as much the function of the college as exposure to the natural, the biological, and the metaphysical sciences.

By placing every man in the college in a tutorial group, the college would be providing its members with the equivalent of Social Insurance policies. There is at least the possibility that friendships arising out of such contacts would do much towards preventing individuals from being or becoming maladjusted, and even more towards converting the grind, the weir, the book-worm, and the recluse into normal social animals, with an interest in current events, the Nugget, Smith sub-suffragettes, and the Harvard game in addition to their intellectual concerns.

Also, the ability to think on one's feet, to pay out an ideational line of thought one length ahead of its conversion into speech is coming to be more and more essential to the average undergraduate, as the bulk of college graduates tend increasingly to become salesmen and executives, instead of professors, doctors, architects, lawyers, or divines. By putting a premium on the nicely articulate expression of one's own thoughts instead of the inclusive repetition of the thoughts of other men, as is usually the case in, classroom recitation, the undergraduate would acquire an ease in the use of language and in expressing himself which would stand him in good stead in post-college life. --The Dartmouth.