I am an alumni councillor of Dartmouth College, and while attending the most recent AC meeting I heard an appropriate, if nutty, joke made by one of our speakers

"How many Dartmouth Alumni does it take to change a lightbulb"

"50,000. One to change the lightbulb, and 49,999 to complain about how they liked the old one better"

Yep, that is Dartmouth in a nutshell. The bigger issue, though, is that the OLD lightbulb might really have been better in the case of Dartmouth.

Dartmouth College is an enigma to say the least. It developed over time as into the premier liberal arts college (holding court for other contenders such as Williams, Amherst, and Haverford). But simultaneously Dartmouth always had a bone to pick with major research universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

This is the groundwork for the angst of the late 20th/early 21st century at Dartmouth. Is it really a small elite university, or a very large, comprehensive college.

Well, IMHO it is a college, and a darn good one at that. Daniel Webster fought on Dartmouth's behalf in the US Supreme Court to prevent it from becoming Dartmouth University and I see no need to make him roll over in his grave by changing it now.

Unfortunately, school administrators don't see it that way. They want to have more MA and PhD programs, more research fellows and faculty, and less collegiate atmosphere.

So, without further ado, this is my opinion in a nutshell.

--* Dartmouth is a worse college than it was 10 years ago, but it is still the best place to go to college in the entire world.

Specifically:

Academics:

The Good:
The faculty are on par with faculty at any major university worldwide. You might not get the high priced free-agent faculty that Harvard and Yale seem to enlist, but at the same time you will get equally competent faculty that are _accessible_ to the student body. As a student at Dartmouth I played tennis and squash with my professors, went out drinking with them, and spent hours in their offices or on the Dartmouth green both discussing class subject matter as well as receiving huge amounts of (free) advice and mentoring.

The Bad:
The experience that I describe is being weeded out at Dartmouth. Faculty are pushed to publish as much as possible and to have less and less contact with their students out of class. Tenure decisions, once based wholly on teaching ability and faculty peer/student opinion, are now being increasingly decided by publishing frequency; many popular and loved professors are being denied tenure (read: fired) because they spend time ensuring students learn material rather than writing esoteric new manuscripts.

Social Life:

The Good:
Even though I-91 and I-89 came about late in the 1950s and 1960s , linking Dartmouth to Montreal, Boston, and New York, the school is still pretty remote. This means that you will spend time with your peers and not at bars and nightclubs. Why? Because there are no nightclubs and there really aren't any other social venues to escape to.

The fraternity and sorority system at Dartmouth is a huge plus to the campus environment. All parties are open and free (free beer!) and the attitude at most parties is laid back and casual. Even if you are a non-member of a house you are more often than not perfectly welcome to come on over to watch a football game or play a game of pong or 8 ball. While the Greek system is dominant, there is no pressure to drink at Dartmouth.

Let me qualify this. I was president of my fraternity at Dartmouth and did not drink at my fraternity. I think I can speak from experience here.

Beyond the fraternity scene the social life is diverse and varied. There is a student center which attempts to mimic fraternity life (pool tables, pong tables, and a pub). The area is very cosmopolitan for a small town, with opera, music, and ballet being imported on a near weekly basis during the school term. There also exist plenty of athletic and academic extracurricular options.

The Bad:

Dartmouth College is on a death and destruction mission to try to turn the social life upside down. They are hell bent on destroying the Greek System and really don't seem to put much emphasis on replacing it with anything. (I've heard deans recommend "milk and cookies parties" in dorm basements, chaperoned by professors. NO KIDDING)

As the title dictates, Dartmouth's motto is "Vox Clamantis in Deserto" or "A voice cries in the wilderness". The new ethic is "in loco parentis" meaning "Taking the place of your parents".

Now more people reading this will probably be parents than 17 somethings looking at colleges. You might be thinking "hey, that sounds good". Well I beg to differ. In loco parentis as an educational approach was overthrown in the late 1950s as archaic and demeaning. Its resurgence recently is partly based in avoiding litigation, but mostly based in a government/administration/experts know best ideology that is patently un-american.

Athletics:

The Good:
Just about every sport you could ever want to play, on the varsity, freshman (JV), and intramural level. Plenty of access to training facilities that are very high quality. This is not UCLA's football facility that we're talking of here, but Dartmouth has high end equipment that is more than enough for the typical ivy league student-athlete (student first, athlete second).

When I entered Dartmouth in 1991 I was told that over 75% of students participated in sports teams. I also saw that the other 25% made it a point to attend sporting events and to support their school. There is tons of school spirit. A lot of tradition has been vanquished by the stalinists in admin, but the support is still there at a high level.

The Bad:
None really, other than if you are not really into sports you will be pretty bored on Saturday afternoons every fall when the campus is a ghost-town because everybody is at the football stadium.

Residential Life:

The Good:
Many different dormitory clusters of differing personalities. Some remote clusters (River, Choate, Lodge) more than compensate for their remoteness with a high-degree of resident unity and strong bonds of friendship. Some dormitories have great location (Hitchcock, Gold Coast dorms), others have great amenities ("New Dorms").
Upperclassmen can also live off campus or in fraternities/sororities.

All dorms have been hardwired for internet connectivity (always on, free of charge, T1 speed) since the late 1980s. Once upon a time before the internet was widely discovered Dartmouth students prowled usenet, bitnet, and other older networks at lightning fast speed. Dartmouth knows internet, that's for sure.

People still rarely lock their doors and very little seems to go missing. Dormitories are only locked on major weekends when "randoms" (out of towners) appear. The campus is very safe and many women feel perfectly comfortable jogging on darker roads at night. And with good reason, as Hanover NH is one of the safest towns in the entire country.

Food options are varied and generally above par, though very expensive. Dartmouth has decided to take all of its savings from its massive purchasing power and use it to pay local, unionized employees huge salaries instead of giving economical food to its students. c'est la guerre.

The Bad:

Not too much bad with residential life. Some unlucky freshmen and rarely some very unlucky upperclassmen will be stuck with 1 room doubles. But for most people at most universities, and most people who attended college in the 1970s or before, this is a 'normal' college room. The mega-suites that are more prevalent at Dartmouth are fantastic. In my freshman year I had a 4 room quad with bathroom and shower (and janitorial service). In my sophomore year I enjoyed a 3 room double with bathroom and shower and air conditioning. That was above average but not ridiculously so.


Oh there is so much more that I can write, but I think I'll try to keep some for subject-specific reviews in the future for each facet of Dartmouth life.

Dartmouth is a fantastic college. It just has a bunch of incompetent nincompoops running it. That is sad because it takes very little time to destroy what took decades and centuries to build.

All told though, it is still a fantastic institution that I am proud to have attended.

Hope this helps!







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