PRESENT AND PAST. Andy Scott '45, now in his senior year, finds skiing, his main winter hobby, quite a change from the days when he was flying a PB4Y-2 as an Ensign in the Naval Air Corps. Left, he is shown waxing up for an afternoon on the Hanover slopes. Below, Scott (second from the right in the back row) is shown with the officers and crew of the big Navy plane on which he served. Altogether he had 29 months of service, none of it overseas, and received his discharge last November.

is likely he never will be. We can't say that much of this broadening will come to him later. It doesn't work that way. As proof I offer you the faculty. They have greater opportunities than most men, but how many take advantage of them? They have never been trained or stimulated to vary their intellectual diet. They can't give us the curiosity they themselves lack. We are in danger of becoming, like our professors, men possessed of but one part of a jigsaw puzzle. We shall be like the blind men led to an elephant. The first of these, encountering a leg, said, "Why, this 'elephant' is very like a tree!" A second, feeling the trunk, declared it to be more like a hose. The third one felt the ear and decided the elephant was a fan. The last man, chancing on the tail, assured the others that this "elephant" was nothing more nor less than a snake. Could we get an accurate idea of an elephant from any of these men? Can we, if we retain our narrow approach, ever hope to understand what makes the wheels go round in a Twentieth Century world?

The average veteran returning to Dartmouth is "eager." In most cases he comes back with a fixed purpose, older, knowing what he wants. Often he's married. That man no longer needs to be forced to study. What he needs is freedom and encouragement. Couple these with the enthusiasm within him, and near miracles can be worked.

When I came to Hanover as a freshman I went on the theory that college was just as much social life and beer as it was books. Somewhere during the two and a half years I was in the Navy my ideas on that score changed. I think it was the time I saw wasted that did it. I swore that, once back

at school, I'd go after the important things and not waste time getting grades. Of course I've sold out. I thought I could take what I wanted from a course and let the rest go. I did not want to carry any course past what I figured was the point of diminishing returns. But that couldn't be, and I'm in there scrambling for grades. Tuck School has many more applicants than it can handle, and grades talk. Thus I don't use my time as would profit me most, but rather squeeze every course dry in order to get a good-looking scholastic record.

The DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE is running a series of articles that will try to re-examine the basic tenets of Dartmouth and liberal education. If we mean to take the inquiry seriously, if we are interested in improving our college along any lines possible, we might ask ourselves a few questions. Does Dartmouth extend as much freedom as it might to responsible upperclassmen? Can there be no further extension of the Senior Fellowship princi-

ple? Secondly, does Dartmouth, with the funds at its disposal, attract the best possible professorial talent to Hanover? If it does not, why not?

By WILLIAM H. MILLER JR. '49

A very wise man once gave me a gloomy warning about the Aims of Youth. "Be careful what you decide you want when you're young," he said, "you're very apt to get it when you're older," and he was quite right. He also gave me this rather epigrammatic advice, with an implication I (innocently) missed: it doesn't matter what you *are*; it only matters what you *become*. Now this "becoming" would seem to be a matter of maturation in a propitious environment, something which implies the operation of what we call education; as a matter of fact, we can consider that education is just this process of becoming—which is certainly as unrestricted

Issue of MARCH 1946

13

edge and a small but comfortable reputation. Why, then, go back, to college?

The answer, of course, is that my most efficient and productive activity in the world seems to lie somewhere between city-planning and architecture, professions which have as their very cornerstone what is called a good liberal education. A first-rate designer (such as Frank Lloyd Wright) must be more than a superlative technician, he must be a philosopher in his own right: to plan the background for a *design of life* (important words, those!) for others, he must know how to live well himself, must in fact be prodigiously knowledgeable in many fields. Thus to Dartmouth, one reason among many, rather than to a more specialized school.

My focus of interest seems to be circum-scribed within the range of a comparatively new field, Industrial Design, a profession full of potential and challenge, unexplored, comparatively unresolved. In other words, my anticipated function in the world will be that of arbiter of form in producing well-designed articles for mass manufacture. This is useful work; viewed sociologically, the work the profession can accomplish in the postwar years in helping plan a new, vigorous American way of life is uncommonly worthwhile and rewarding.

Do I have the requirements for success in this field? Well, I've been to some pains to find out: psychological tests (aptitudes, interests, L.Q., values-scale, and so forth) help a good deal; having worked over a period of eight years at all sorts of jobs helps knowing what occupations are sympathetic; above all, there is intuition. If these check, required in addition is a love for the mechanics of construction, and the metaphysics of problems of form, and of their representation, and the perfection of geometric dorian design. Add to these tactical and visual sensuality, pleasure in the incredible (which is a Sense of Magic) and some good-humored affectations (which I prefer to think of as a Sense of Theatre) and you have it.

Working on the *Sunstill* in a very well-equipped plastics laboratory on and off over a period of several years, I was fortunate in being able to develop several plastic products in spare time of a design-invention nature. (This term, because in some senses the two words are almost synonymous—good design must be by definition inventive and invention is often entirely a matter of good design). One of these was a lightweight plastic hat-sunshade developed for the Quartermaster Corps to replace heavy, expensive and spacetaking pith helmets in the tropics. It utilized inflation both for excellent dead-air-space insulation and to give it its form, which incidentally was of a very stimulating Buck Rogers appearance. Another project was a kayak-type plastic inflated boat, a vast improvement over the famous pre-war German "Folbots," designed to weigh only a few pounds and fold into a small

suitcase when deflated. The most sensational job was what *Time* described as "a chair whose fish-net seat (draped over a pneumatic plastic doughnut) was surreally adapted to the most unsurrealistic sitter." I had the great good fortune at twenty-two to have the Museum of Modern Art exhibit models of all these things in their fifteenth anniversary show, "Art in Progress."

We used a word with the *Sunstill*, "Orientation," which described the process by which the face of the still was kept always turned as efficiently as possible towards the activating sun. Some stills needed no orientation, but the most compact designs were productive in direct ratio as they were

well orientated. I mention all this because "orientation" is an excellent word to describe the way in which people get their own distilling surfaces, so to speak, turned as efficiently as possible to the activating source; these notes, in fact, describe the process of orientation of one individual to

DARTMOUTH FRESHMAN'S INVENTIONS. (Top) Bill Miller '49, co-inventor of the Sunstill for converting sea water into drinking water, shown filling the balloon-like device while George Gallowhur, head of the Gallowhur Chemical Corporation, looks on. (Left) A lightweight, plastic sun hood, using inflation for insulation, developed for the Quartermaster Corps to replace heavy, space-taking pith helmets in the tropics. (Below) an inflated plastic chair which is both comfortable and sturdy, collapses to the size of a brief case, and is heaven-sent for people on the move.

Issue of MARCH 1946

15

the world, with some emphasis on education, and on Dartmouth College.

I can't tell you whether or not it is an entirely good thing to have come to college at twenty-four; certainly some aspects of college life mean little to the older returned veterans and others are better understood by virtue of maturity. For my own part, having waited four years for college, and having worked hard to get here, I can state with some cogency why I'm here and what I can hope to find; since I regard education, however, as having neither beginning nor end, all experience as more or less instructive, I see Dartmouth as one special (howbeit extremely important) source of education. Other sources, generally encountered after college, have enormous importance. Social environment is one: education among the Athenians, for example, was largely a social affair; the Greek youth formed his ideas naturally and, in a sense, osmotically from contact with older and mellower intelligences. In the Renaissance the master and apprenticeship system was efficacious in the extreme. Some professions, architecture and law among others, come close to this tradition; the neophyte first works in the office of an established practitioner. After college, I myself would like to work for a while under a self-chosen master.

In general, I believe it is Dartmouth's ultimate mission to impart to her students revelation of two prime spheres of information, information which is prerequisite for successful orientation. One is intrinsic and subjective-self-knowledge. One is intrinsic and objective-knowledge of the culture in which we live.

Today, the necessity for self-knowledge is imposed upon us by society, and transcends the limits of distraction or diversion. In a world of technicians, more and more controlled by categories and card-indexes, we must take every available opportunity to isolate our weaknesses, define the limits of our capacities and predilections, and finally evaluate our potential.

It is equally important that we attain to as profound an understanding as possible of the forces at work in our times and our world-epoch. Each of us must, in the light of all the information he can achieve, formulate his own *Weltanschauung*, his own world-view. We cannot plan our adjustment to the world in terms of the conditions and values our fathers encountered a generation ago. Mechanization, spreading for a century like a tide over the earth, has accelerated almost in geometrical progression the development of the infinitely complex interpenetrations of social change we see everywhere about us. It is necessary to live and act in the present, and to understand the present. And one must anticipate the day-after-tomorrow to be even up-to-date in such a runaway world.

These two factors, then, must be equated by each one of us and worked together to a solution which brings into rapport our obligations to ourselves as well

as to society. Since it is to a great extent within the scope of each one of us to select his environment, the first duty of each man to himself is to determine the environment in which he is most likely to flourish, and to surround himself with it. Adjustment of the man to society is more complex. Certainly, however, it would appear in these times that we should look for more to be got from a college than, for example, a facility with the mechanics of making money. Security, in itself a proper enough consideration, can never again be an ideal. Those of us who remember the economic crack-up of our fathers' world and the unprincipled moral cynicism of the "boom days" which brought it on, those of us who grew up in the disillusion of the depression years, are painfully and gravely aware of the urgent need for new and valid ethics of living. The place to start thinking about these ethics of living is right here at Dartmouth.

Is this a too solemn view to take of things? I think not. The world today is a pretty solemn place. We all come to realize in good time that one cannot live without using such abstracts as "faith" and "honor," although there was a time when such words were a bit embarrassing, like funerals or going to Sunday school. We have before us every morning over the orange juice the one inescapable question: what shall we do now? What is most worthwhile? What is the wisest thing to do?

In a desperate world grown suddenly too small, this question involves more than our selfish interests alone, and we realize the debt every man, particularly men at such a place as Dartmouth, the potential leaders of the next generation, must pay to the world.

THIS ISN'T THE WAY HE REALLY STUDIES, but Roy Carruthers '42, former Major in the Army Air Corps, does have his wife Mary nearby for moral support as he resumes college studies after five years.

I myself believe that a dependable happiness is best based on usefulness, on building, on good work (in my case, on creative work), on social approbation and pride in work well done. I'm staking the boundaries of my little melon-patch here at college and I hope to be happy after college cultivating that melon-patch. I know that Dartmouth will always be a country club to some few of those lucky enough (these days, at any rate!) to be here, and this is proper and natural enough. I know too that my fault is on the side of too much seriousness. I think I would like being a little frivolous for a change. But I am expending on this venture a good deal of energy, money and time, all three precious commodities; above all, I am aware of how much is to be accomplished in the flight of the short days—so you see I am at the end content to remain one of the old graybeards of the campus scene.

By ROB ROY CARRUTHERS '42

RETURNING to college has been a happy experience for me, and I am glad to have an opportunity to describe some of the things which have made these past few months here at Dartmouth seem as good as those before the war. It wasn't long after the war had started when I first seriously thought of coming back to Dartmouth some day. I had been away then about a year and a half, which seemed like a long time. Now that the war is over, I appreciate that a year and a half is really a short time. Nevertheless, if someone had told me that the matter of returning to Dartmouth would continue to be on my

16

DARTMOUTH ALUMNI MAGAZINE