The Undergraduate Chair

During my year as Undergraduate Editor of the Alumni Magazine, these scrawlings will attempt to communicate student sentiment on various issues. Some columns may be light; most probably will not be. The students quoted here, regardless of their backgrounds, cannot represent all Dartmouth students, and neither can I. Yet, insofar as we are part of that group, help shape and are shaped by it, we will, to some good extent, reflect at least its general mood.

Prompted by my participation, as a 'token' volunteer student, in the 1973 Alumni College, I set forth to explore the nether world of student attitudes toward alumni..Several students on campus this past summer confirmed my notion that student opinion about alumni seems to have changed over the past few years - from the alumni viewpoint, I would guess, somewhat for the better.

Albert Pelz '74, has worked on TheDartmouth, the Student Forum, the D.C.U. tutoring program, a Trustee study group on college investments, and was arrested in the spring of 1972 during a peaceful demonstration at CRREL, the Army center for cold regions research in Hanover, against the mining of Haiphong.

Said Pelz: "Students now are less antagonistic toward alumni than they were a few years ago at the height of the College's controversies - the war, coeducation, the Indian symbol." The vocal minority of students perceived alumni as being collectively opposed to the fulfillment of student goals on these issues. Why the change in attitudes? The Pennsylvania senior saw several possibilities. The first related to alumni involvement in the admissions process. He explained: "Before the war, the coeducation debate, and the takeover at Parkhurst roused the campus and the alumni alike, the admissions emphasis was on the 'well-rounded' but 'unusual' student" who turned out to be something of a troublemaker. Now, according to Pelz, alumni on a local level have a changed picture of the ideal Dartmouth student, someone "the College will feel secure with...."

Admitting he could be wrong about the admissions emphasis, Pelz said he noticed, beginning with the Class of 1974 - the first class to arrive in Hanover after Parkhurst and the strike - a "trend to pre-professionalism ... a tendency to see college as a function of one's career and not as having the real value of education for itself. Students are now more selforiented." (See the Undergarduate Chair, May 1973.)

For Bruce Barcelo '74, director of programs and director of the 1973 freshman trip for the Dartmouth Outing Club, coeducation was the pivot on which student feelings about alumni turned.

The war "did not have the immediacy" of coeducation "one could get away from it for a while." Coeducation involved "whether the guy living next to you would be a girl next year," and when Barcelo arrived in Hanover in 1970, it was coeducation about which "the largest number of both students and faculty were intellectualizing, moralizing, and philosophizing."

According to Barcelo, "Many students then saw alumni as some sort of gigantic green monolith wanting to keep Dart- mouth one hundred years from now exact- ly as it was when they knew it. As such they could be allies or the opposition." To freshmen, additionally, the alumnus was difficult to associate with the College as the student knew it, as "the alum drove around Hanover in his green Cadillac, with a Connecticut license plate."

After coeducation was approved, said Barcelo, "the image of the monolith broke down. Alumni became . de-symbolized. They were no longer a symbol of any one thing in particular. There was no issue for the campus to judge them on anymore. With coeducation behind them, students became more interested in themselves, in getting their bearings again. Students now are not thinking a whole hell of a lot about alumni."

Bill Nisen '73, who began teaching at Norwich University last month, has also gone through this opinion-changing process.

"During my sophomore year," (1970 - Pelz' and Barcelo's first year) "the big thing was to cut down Dartmouth and its alumni, who were envisioned as its major power group," said the former director of the Student Forum. The average alumnus was, for Nisen, "a fifty-five-year-old Boston banker."

"After meeting them here," Nisen said, "I've come to see that really the alumni, the people most stereotyped, are the group most beneficial to the College. Tempering their personal wishes about where Dartmouth should go, they help the College a great deal." Why the initial view? "I can't really describe why I had that view - out of the movies, the moral and cultural revolution of the last twenty years ... I guess out of ignorance more than anything else. A student never meets many alumni, and comes to believe their influence is solely a function of their great wealth."

"The stereotypes are being broken down, alumni interest is getting a better reception," concluded Nisen, who has already decided to be a Class Agent for the Class of 1973.

Divisive issues are at a minimum now, nationally and in Hanover. Students have turned inward, and a different type of student is here now than a few years ago - a more traditional sort of student. Perhaps today's student will rediscover the oldest stereotype of all: the Big Greener still out there helping to make Milwaukee famous.

Yet, at Alumni College, a number of my stereotypes, good and bad, were broken down. As Pelz said: "Alumni College is a nice vacation, but that aside, the alumni attending do show some willingness to continue their personal growth and evaluate the questions haunting society." More than that. I found a number of people committed, not to just themselves, but to higher set of ethics.

But what about the alumni whom I and so many other students don't meet? The characterizations remain, the favor-able/new ones and the unfavorable/one ones, at least for those of us who think about alumni. That this is the case matters little now really. But when the the issues surface again, the discussion which before was lacking between alumni and students on these issues must be brought about directly on campus, rather than indirectly through charges and generalizations by both sides.

It would be unfortunate if we ended up talking about some Boston banker, rather than to him.

Drew Newman, co-author of the review ofcoeducation in the June issue, is an editorof The Dartmouth. He comes fromWynnewood, Pennsylvania.