Dartmouth Men Live Sociable, Woodsy Life Undergrads Learn Poise in Liquory, Girl-Soaked Weekends

Dartmouth men take their college seriously from the time they don their green beanies as freshmen to the sad day of their last promenade about the campus in green senior jackets and canes.

They all learn how to ski, how to drink, how to get along with people, and how to cheer at football games. In short, they learn how to be Dartmouth men. Politically, they are Republicans; economically they are at least "well-to-do."

The avowed purpose of the 177-year old college is to develop men "of broad interests and good character," and teaching undergraduates to live and work together is the focal point of most of its official programs. As soon as the downy-cheeked freshman first sets foot on the Hanover campus, he is prompted to mingle with his classmates. His quarters are spacious but purposely drab, so that he will be discouraged from gathering mold over his books in scholarly isolation. The result is that the average Dartmouth man knows at least 200 of his fellows well enough to carry a conversation past the weather and Saturday football stages. Another result is that he is likely to be a well-adjusted, sociable citizen as an alumnus.

Pride in the college and a tremendous feeling of "belonging" pervade the green Hanover mists. Dartmouth men are proud of the rugged outdoor life for which their school is famous. They like to know that most girls would sacrifice a leg for an invitation to the Winter Carnival and that the world looks on them as jolly, intelligent good fellows.

Freshmen Get Gentle Hazing

The mild ritual of hazing gives the freshman an immediate place in college life as well as in the continuum of Dartmouth tradition. He must wear his beanie and nametag, move furniture for the upperclassmen, keep off the grass, and attend all rallies. There is nothing rough and tumble about the scheme, but it gives him a great sense of class solidarity as well as something out of the ordinary to think about.

Scholastically, Dartmouth is a college, and its adherents are careful to indicate the distinction between college and university. The main concern of schools like Harvard, point out the collegians, is the "discovery of knowledge and the training of graduate students in methods of discovery." A great part of the university's effort must be devoted to research work by faculty and students.

"The primary concern of the college," enunciated President-Emeritus Ernest M. Hopkins, "is not with what men shall do but with what men shall be" It is in this sense that Dartmouth is eternally the college.

School spirit in Hanover is still dragging its picturesque traditions out of their wartime hiding places. Great chunks of the student body are not sure whether Dartmouth is a "rah-rah" college or not; visitors who have watched a Big Green football rally, the freshman sophomore fight, or seniors ambling about in dark green jackets with their class numerals emblazed on the pocket are sure that it is.

Something well worth staying away from is the annual Wet Down ceremony in the spring. The senior class forms a double column across the commons and all the juniors, sophomores, freshmen, and campus wheels in that order run the gauntlet of flailing leather belts. As each bruised figure reaches the end of the line, he joins in to wreak vengeance on those behind. "Thus do freshmen become sophomores," writes the Daily Dartmouth.

Last year after the Princeton game, the college band alighted from its train in New York's Pennsylvania Station and marched up Seventh Avenue playing Dartmouth songs to an appreciate wayside audience. They climaxed the event by tying up traffic in Times Square to the tune of Glory to Dartmouth," says the daily, calling the episode "possibly the best example of what is meant by school spirit."

In Hanover, there is little interest shown in extracurricular work. The Daily Dartmouth, oldest college newspaper in the nited States, publishes six times a week without any real student enthusiasm behind it. The paper has been unable to muster a staff even half the size of the Crimson's. Other undergraduate organizations--dramatic and language societies, glee club and band--struggle along with the support of the particularly interested few instead of flourishing as might be expected on so isolated a campus as Dartmouth's.

Exception to the rule is the Outing Club. For a college in which everyone skis, the club maintains a chain of 16 cabins and several shelters reaching out into the Vermont hills. On Mt. Moosilauke, known familiarly as "Dartmouth's Mountain," the club has set up 14 miles of ski trails with "Hell's Highway" one of the steepest runs in New England. Out on the golf course are 13 more miles of ski trails, a 1200 foot tramway, and two mammoth jumps. The Outing Club is probably one of the most active outdoor groups in the country.

Lipstick and Old Lace

Socially, Hanover is strictly a weekend town. There just aren't any women around. Girls begin to filter into waiting Dartmouth arms some time Friday evening, and by Sunday night most of the arms are empty again. In between there is plenty of liquor and plenty to do.

The college makes it easy for non-fraternity men to entertain their dates by allowing women in the dormitories until midnight on week nights and one o'clock Sunday morning. "If you want to keep things going," says one junior, "there are some resort gains a few miles away for all night blanket parties."

About 40 percent of the men belong to fraternities, all of them upperclassmen. Unlike some mid-western universities. Dartmouth has been careful not to let the Greek letters dominate campus politics. Fraternity men do not band together to back their own candidates for office or foist their whims on a neglected student body. In the tremendous camaraderie that is Dartmouth life, they fail even to develop the exclusive clannishness for which they are most often criticized.

A scant two years ago, John Sloan Dickey became president of the college, and since that time he has done some face-lifting in Hanover that has also lifted some eyebrows among the conservative Dartmouth family.

Revamps Room Assignments

He has put an end to the policy of lumping minority groups in rooms together. Unless they specifically request such an assignment, Negros, Jews, and Catholics no longer know with grim certainty that their roommates will be respectively Negros, Jews, and Catholics.

Up to the time Dickey took office, sons of Alumni were virtually guaranteed a place in the college. Somebody figured out then that by 1970 there would not be room for all those sons of Dartmouth, much less for outsiders. The new president seized the argument and soon tapered off the circular inbreeding. The once-privileged sons now go through the same admissions interviews as anyone else.

Personally, Dickey has brought to Hanover an informality unknown during the 29-year tenure of President Hopkins. Dickey, who in 1929 was still a Big Green undergraduate, has forsaken Hopkins' sleek, presidential limousine for a sturdy little jeep. He has been known to pitch in with the snow shoveling squads and has been variously photographed with dogs, a genuine Dartmouth Indian baby, and a broad chief executive smile. Undergraduates who are not afraid of him like him.

Great Issues Project

Dickey's pet project is the Great Issues course which is required of all seniors. Designed to bring the foundation knowledge of the first three college years into sharp focus on the great national and international problems of the world. Great Issues offers lecturers like Archibald MacLeish. Lewis Mumford, and President Conant. It gives the men of Dartmouth a common cultural experience to match the enthusiastic social solidarity fostered by for years of living and working together in Hanover.