Occidental College - La Encina Yearbook (Los Angeles, CA)

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BOOK HE PRESENT yearbook is intended to represent the achievements and activities of a college in the process of a modest upward evolu- tion. There are, it must be said, significant features of any institution which the subtlest camera technique cannot grasp — intangible assets — tokens of an inter- nal quality, which even the pen, particularly when in student hands, is hard put to make explicit. It is to a definition of these indefinables, the spirit, tone and personality of Occidental College, that this introduction is de- voted. Since its childhood as an academy, Occidental has each year more competently met the require- ments of a Liberal Arts college. Of Western in- stitutions it has been among the first to become aware that a college owes something more to its undergraduates than a crisp scholastic instruc- tion. Today, although the curriculum bears few formal indications of the trend, few students are unconscious of the school ' s educational progres- siveness. A certain charming informality is the first noticeable feature of campus life. There is nothing of the grim bustle and drive of the gar- gantuan educational plants to which Western culture has become addicted. A close-knit social life gives a feeling of unity and common purpose to each of its participants. Something of the cam- pus congeniality has crept into the classroom. The student-professor relationship has long ago evolved from the knuckle-rapping stage to a more benevolent form of paternalism. Student opinion regularly finds voice in chapel symposia. That professor who at eleven o ' clock expounds Kant from Olympus may be seen at twelve in friendly discussion of last week ' s baseball game with the student whom he had but recently chided for a stuttering definition of Transcen- dentalism. Possibly it is the strategic location of the cam- pus, possibly it is a combination of selective en- rollment with tactful administrative guidance, which gives to Occidental College an atmosphere and inherent feeling of social unity distinctive among large and small colleges alike. It is not ex- clusively a year-book boast, at all events, that on this campus there have been combined, with in- creasing effectiveness each year, the two ends of constructive living and intellectual advancement. In the realm of the college administration dur- ing the past year, particular internal forces have been at work which, although sometimes quiet in their movement, have made significant con- tributions to the evolution of Occidental College. Chief among administrative obligations is that of maintaining a faculty of a high and progres- sive cultural tone. What threatened to be a seri- ous gap in the Department of History and Gov- ernment when Professor Thomas R. Adam left on a year ' s leave of absence to join the Guggen- heim Foundation in New York, has been effec- tively filled by Dr. Donald M. Brown, who comes to Occidental fresh from a position as a govern- ment consultant. Professor Harry Kirkpatrick has given new strength to the Department of Mathematics and the coming of Mr. Pari Welch to the Department of Religion has been a decid- ed tonic. Older students will regret the retire- ment of Professor William B. Allison, of the Modern Languages Department and the resigna- tion of Professor Virgil Morse, for years a mem- ber of the Department of Mathematics. Never given to boasting, even through formal