You Can Go Home Again
WHATS MORE EXCITING than stepping onto the Dartmouth campus for the beginning of freshman week, your first autumn in Hanover? For many alumni, even for ones were the most homesick pea-green freshmen, the first weeks of the first year at Dartmouth will always evoke the most vivid memories of a place and a sense of community. The spirit of the campus, the athletic season, even the weather, all of these combine with the first real experience away from home to raise a poor 18 year old into the mists of euphoria. Some never come down from the mists.
The College takes care of its mistier alumni in many ways. For years, the football weekend and the class reunion were the only ways to come back to the campus for most alumni. Then came the notion of continuing education and the start of the highly successful Alumni College. For two weeks, an alumnus can dust off the Gradusad Parnasum and spend his vacation with his family on the campus. This two weeks in August satisfies some, but I have found a better way.
For three summers now, I have been enrolled as a candidate for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies at Dartmouth. Six years out of the College, six years a teacher in independent schools, I opened my ALUMNI MAGAZINE one day in the winter, and the announcement of an inter-disciplinary, non-thesis, master's degree designed for teachers - at Dartmouth College - hit me in the eye. By the time my application blanks had arrived, I realized that I would be grounded in my home city of Albuquerque while my wife presented me with a potential Dartmouth man.
At any rate, in June of 1972, my brother-in-law, Bob Whitten, and I left our families "up the river" (my wife often referred to it as "up the creek") in Littleton and checked into our dormitory room in Streeter Hall. That summer and one more we lived in a dorm five days and went home to the family on the weekends. Last summer we both were able to rent near Hanover, he in Sachem Village, I in Norwich. But enough of autobiography - what goes on here?
What goes on here is that for eight and a half weeks or more each summer I am allowed to haunt my old haunts, try to do right some of the things I did wrong ten years ago, work my tail off to compete with bright undergraduates, and love it.
Try A CREATIVE writing course, English 30, with Professor Darrel Mansell and a room full of regular Dartmouth students and visiting firewomen the year before coeducation starts at Dartmouth. Be on campus for the first and second summers of year-round operation and coeducation. Fight your way through hordes of gaming children to learn the beautiful simplicity of Dartmouth Basic at Kiewit Computation Center terminals. Or just study in the same chair in the Tower Room of Baker Library where you caught so many good winks your sophomore year.
Was Professor Fred Berthold the Dean of the Tucker Foundation when you were here? Oh, you're a little older? Did you take biology from Professor William Ballard? You're a recent graduate? Ever have John Price in English? In 1973 I had all three of them in one course: "Darwin and Freud: Shapers of New Views of Man and Nature."- This was one of two "liberal studies" courses taught that summer specifically for M.A.L.S. students but open to undergraduates as well. Two such courses are required of each M.A.L.S. candidate, and I haven't heard any of my friends complain that they're not working hard enough in these courses. Long papers and journals, lectures and discussions, sometimes even arguments (sometimes arguments even among the faculty), extra movies, final exams, long, long reading lists - these are some of the requirements of the wide-ranging liberal studies course.
The beauty of this approach is that while it forces you to broaden your understanding of a given subject, it also permits you to deepen your interest in an area of special personal appeal. I'm an English teacher, primarily, though I dabble in mathematics and even (shudder) administration. So for one paper in "Darwin and Freud" I studied the life and letters of "Darwin's Bulldog," Thomas Henry Huxley, a favorite of mine since we studied his beautiful essay "On a Piece of Chalk" in English 30 the summer before. That paper counted toward the science side of the aisle. The next paper dealt with Freudian symbolism in Eugene O'Neill's MourningBecomes Electra. And on the take-home final exam I tried questions on Kierkegaard, Freud, and Darwin.
If I tell you that the M.A.L.S. program required two of those liberal studies courses (last summer's were called "Self and Society: Coming of Age," and "Politics of the Atom"), four courses from your division (science, social science or humanities), and two courses out of your division, even the slower adders will realize that over four summers (the prescribed length of the program) that works out to two courses each summer. But there is one more requirement: the colloquium.
THE COLLOQUIUM gathers the entire M.A.L.S. Program and many outsiders into Dartmouth Hall (they've plushed 105 up some since Herb West's last lecture in 1964) for a "guest speaker." Donald Barr has tried to find out WhoPushed Humpty Dumpty? from that podium and Kenneth Guscott has stepped to our stage from the chambers of Judge Garrity in Boston. Ruth Adams, Vice President of the College, fielded questions from liberated and unenlightened schoolpersons almost as her first official duty at Dartmouth. President Kemeny spoke, almost certainly not for the last time, on "Imagination and the Computer."
As a part of the colloquium, too, each first-year student writes a journal and each third-year student completes a project related to the theme. Both journal and project use Alan T. Gaylord, Professor of English and Director of the M.A.L.S. Program, as sounding board, resource aide, confidant, reader and critic, but both are to satisfy the student first. Typically, the student has done some reading over the winter and spends much more time in reading and talking the issues of the summer ("Success and Failure in America and in American Education") than in the writing of the project. Still, as I completed my discussion of grades as measures of success and failure, I realized how much I had been forced to learn as I read to prepare for the writing.
THE PROGRAM is there. It's working if you're working. And somehow, after ten years now, my perspective on how and why I want this educational process to work has changed, as you would know it must. It seems so obvious now that learning is not something that stops when you go out into the wide, wide world.
And have you noticed, I haven't mentioned the Indian symbol once? Does my report of classes and campus life over the last three years sound as if the essential Dartmouth experience has changed? There's still a poker game going on at my old fraternity house. Students still pack the ledges on a hot afternoon. It's as sleepy in the reserve room in the summer as in the winter. There was even a "Summer Carnival" this year - with the proceeds to go to charity. Most important, the lively interaction of learners with other learners still goes on all over campus from the seminars in Sanborn House to the frisbee games on the Green.
Well, this summer's passed, my third in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies. But I'm lucky. I'll be here again next summer, for in the M.A.L.S. program I found a way: You can go home again.
Dick Redington has been teaching English,math, and Latin at Albuquerque Academysince 1966.
