Class of '45

Big, blue-eyed Clarence Addison Dykstra marched up the Hill last week, smiling and waving to undergraduates. In his spacious, comfortable office, he stretched his long legs and relaxed. He was glad to be back as University of Wisconsin's president. But Dr. Dykstra, home in Madison from a year in Washington (Selective Service Director, Defense Mediator), knew better than most college presidents that he would find no isolation on his campus. In a nation under arms, colleges had new things to do, new facts to face.

Along Langdon Street (fraternity row), where undergraduate voices shrilled in a new college year, and on Observatory Hill, where the boys and girls of the Class of '45 strolled hand in hand, there were palpable changes:

> There was a bigger proportion of co-eds than ever before in Wisconsin's history; they now constituted 41% of the student body, up from 36% last year.

> Male students were preoccupied with draft numbers; college officials estimated that about 1,000 would be called. Hardest hit: the graduate, law and agricultural schools. Deferred: engineers, scientists.

> Lost to the faculty were 50 scientists and technicians called by Washington.

> For the first time since 1923, R.O.T.C. was compulsory for freshmen.

> Biggest change was a sharp shift from liberal arts to technical courses. Enrollment for the general B.A. degree was down nearly 10% (since 1939); for the humanities, down 33%; for engineering, up more

Said earnest President Dykstra: "We've got to buckle down to make the campus as serious a place of business as possible."

Like Wisconsin, other colleges reported smaller enrollments (averaging about 10% less than last year). Harvard had about 7,400, the smallest in many years. To offset losses in the upper classes, many a college lifted the lid off the size of its freshman class. Yale admitted a record class of 980; Columbia, 625.

Union College's President Dixon Ryan Fox warned students deferred by draft boards that they "shall not embezzle the time that the nation has put at our disposal."

University of Oklahoma's new President Joseph A. Brandt announced that he would establish a curfew for men students (women already have one), said he hoped to give professors less work so they could have more ideas.

St. John's College's President Stringfellow Barr planned to supplement the college's 100 classics with a new course in the theory and maintenance of gasoline engines.

Dartmouth launched a new course on the virtues of democracy.

University of California at Los Angeles, at the request of its students, offered a new curriculum in "American Culture and Institutions."

Without waiting for a recount of University of Puerto Rico's students, who had demanded that he choose between the chancellorship of their university and the Governorship of their island, Rexford Guy Tugwell resigned the $15,000 chancellorship, was sworn into the $10,000 Governorship.

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