Hoppy's Generation

One day last week Ernest Martin Hopkins flew from Washington, where for five months he has been busy with U.S. defense, to Hanover, N.H. First thing "Hoppy" did was to strip to his shirt sleeves, make himself comfortable. Then he read a stack of telegrams--from Cordell Hull, Wendell Willkie, William S. Knudsen, John D. Rockefeller Jr., President Roosevelt, many another, in honor of his 25th anniversary as Dartmouth's president.

Dartmouth's alumni, who love every wrinkle of Hoppy's square, rugged face, toasted him at a banquet (his own class --'01--had its 40th reunion). Dartmouth men were proud of what he had done for Dartmouth: he had upped endowment from $4,000,000 to $18,000,000, nearly doubled the faculty and student body. They were proud of his services to the nation: he was in charge of U.S. industrial relations under Secretary of War Newton D. Baker in World War I; in World War II he runs metal and mineral priorities for OPM. They were prouder still that he had helped shape a whole generation of U.S. undergraduates.

When Hoppy became Dartmouth's president in 1916, after working as a personnel man at Filene's Department Store (Boston) and elsewhere, he determined to make Dartmouth a college of hemen. He developed the famed Outing Club, made Dartmouth a power in intercollegiate sports, introduced a new system of selection whereby freshmen were picked not only for brains but for all-round ability. In the '20s, Dartmouth men were the prototype of U.S. collegians--prankish, studiously unkempt, boisterous at football games, busy with campus activities, scornful of esthetes.

Ahead of his times, President Hopkins also introduced honors work, unlimited cuts, a tutorial system. He was one of the first college presidents to denounce Prohibition. Dartmouth men firmly believed that it was Hoppy who saw to it that they were served by a reliable bootlegger. He let no one bully his liberal professors. When an irate alumnus offered Hoppy $50,000 if he would fire a professor who had denounced the conduct of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial by Judge Webster Thayer (a Dartmouth man), Hoppy told the professor about it. The professor fumed. Said Hoppy: "Don't get excited. If you quit, I will too, and we'll split the $50,000."

With undergraduates of the '20s, whom he understood and liked, Hoppy was on intimate terms. Upperclassmen had a standing prank they played on him: they would leave a note on a freshman's desk telling him to call Hanover 65 (Hoppy's number) at 6:05 in the morning and "ask for Ernie, he's in a jam." Hoppy got scores of such calls each year.

But today Hoppy gets few calls, knows barely a dozen men on the campus. Like many of his fellow college presidents, he is confronted by a new undergraduate generation that baffles and saddens him.

Hoppy began to detect a change in undergraduates about 1931. He considered them irresponsible, purposeless, prone to self-pity. Said he: "One frequently gets the impression of a hitchhiking generation." He assailed the New Deal for its effect "on the imagination and aspiration of youth," told a graduating class: "No real friend of yours could wish that you should never face misfortune. ... It is not so that vigor of mind or strength of character is developed."

By last year Hoppy was at loggerheads with his students, angered them by exclaiming: "For some obscure reason . . . it has become presumably a sign of intelligence to be pessimistic and . . . cynical--all of which seems to me to be contrary to the spirit of which the college should be representative."

But last week Hoppy, who believes that "democracy might have to be willing to forgo itself to be able to save itself," was heartened by a recent change in Dartmouth undergraduate sentiment. A plurality of the senior class had plumped for immediate declaration of war on Germany. This week, as he dismissed 499 graduates at Dartmouth's 172nd commencement, he declared:

"It is your generation that will determine, not in middle life but tomorrow, next year, or at the latest within a few brief years, whether ... the faults you visualize in democracy, and the ruthlessness you ignore in totalitarianism shall paralyze your will to defend the one and to defeat the other. . . ."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.