Vets, Freshmen Fill Sanders To Hear Buck and Hanford

Over one thousand freshmen and returning students received the College's official welcome Friday night in Sanders Theatre, as Deans Buck, Hanford, and Leighton and William Yandell Elliott, professor of Government, offered them a first taste of Crimson tradition.

Keynotes of life at the University, said Dean Buck, are the words "freedom and truth." These, he asserted, are cliches too much taken for granted in America.

The rough and ready competition of the early years of this country and of Harvard, he asserted, should no longer be a part of a society where a sense of social responsibility has come into our understanding of freedom.

University is No Ivory Tower

The University, Dean Buck, continued, is "a tremendously vast and complex structure neither ivory tower nor wartime workshop."

Tracing the growth under President Eliot from college to "a great university," Dean Buck described the difficulties of preserving an undergraduate atmosphere. The balance is difficult, he said, when the same faculty is simultancously teaching advanced students and doing research work.

First speaker of the evening, Dean Hanford outlined expansion of the University since the first freshman class met behind a fence erected against stray cattle and wolves. The swollen 5,000 man enrollment this year is a far cry, he pointed out, from those beginnings.

Houses Make Debut

The present house system, he told his audience of newcomers, was first suggested around the turn of the century when the college has grown so large that individuality had lost itself.

Inaugurating the new building scheme was the appearance of Lowell and Dunster Houses, the first named after the family whose connection with the University has been unbroken since 1784, and the latter after its first president.

Dean Hanford reminded his listeners of the faculty's belief that "a person masters and retains best what he learns for himself." Men are left on their own in the hope that they will educate themselves better for it. The deans are on hand to help with problems that may come up in the process.

Professor Elliott, the only non dean on hand at Sanders Theatre, warned the new men that they must find their "intellectual capital" and in that sense the years must not be wasted. "Education," he said, "seeks to erase the passions and prejudices of a narrow environment."

Elliott Charms Freshmen

One of the faculty men who left for war service, Professor Elliott was delighted to meet "a fresh group of people who have never heard my jokes." Upperclassmen may have been familiar with some of the legends, but the predominantly freshman audience gave them warm greeting.

G. Wallace Woodworth '24, associate professor of Music, led the Glee Club through a Russian anthem by Chesnikov and selections from Gilbert and Sullivan's "Yeomen of the Guard" to conclude the program. Soloist was E. Barr Peterson '47, while a medley of, football songs served for an encore.