The College
GROWING pains or symptoms of congenital disability? Problems arising from year-round operation - or Dartmouth's particular brand of it - look quite different to various segments of the College community.
Many see the dislocations of YRO as temporary and inevitable to the implementation of a radical departure from the traditional college calendar; a few see the entire concept as inherently misbegotten. But however wide the disparity of opinion, year-round operation has become a controversial issue on campus, generating considerable heat and a certain amount of light.
Student objections are not new, undergraduates Andrew J. Newman '74 and Melanie Fisher '75 having enunciated them quite clearly last June in the ALUMNI MAGAZINE. But this spring students have been circulating petitions calling for a thorough faculty review of the plan, a course supported by a significant group of the teaching staff. The Dartmouth has embarked on a long series of articles, examining the impact of year-round operation on every facet of student life, curricular and extra-curricular: majors and course requirements, dormitories and fraternities, class solidarity and personal friendships, athletics and campus organizations. Letters to the editor argue softly or stridently from every point of view, from the Dartmouth-has-been destroyed motif to the opposite stance that such broad educational opportunity is inconceivable under any other system.
Faculty opinion is similarly varied. Some professors see year-round operation as detrimental to departmental curricula, to their scholarly responsibilities and their personal lives; others report little effect. Most administrators counsel patience, viewing the early years of so drastic a change as a shake-down period, when problems surface to be ironed out and maladjustments to be adjusted. Conceding that course offerings in the theoretically full-parity summer term so far have not been as rich as they might have been, they express confidence that the terms will soon be truly comparable.
The question also arises as to whether the problems stem from the vast flexibility that is also the undeniable strength of the Dartmouth Plan - the almost limitless options open to students for terms in residence, terms for off-campus study, leave terms for jobs or vacation, so long as they satisfy graduation requirements of 11 terms and 33 courses within five years - rather than from year-round operation itself. President Kemeny has indicated that year-round operation and the Dartmouth Plan are not irrevocably wedded. Although the College is committed to the former, the latter is apparently subject to whatever modification circumstances require.
As he reported to the faculty after last month's board meeting, the Trustees "feel there is no alternative to YRO." But, he added, "There is nothing magic about the current plan to implement YRO."
There has been less difficulty than anticipated, administrative officers report, in attracting students to the summer term, one of which is required by the Dartmouth Plan, and perhaps more in their acceptance of an off-campus fall term. In his five-year report in the April issue of the ALUMNI MAGAZINE, President Kemeny acknowledged that "we have not yet figured out a way of making the spring term with baseball and mud season as attractive as the fall term with football and the beauty of a Hanover October."
At the same time, the President suggested the possibility that changes of the last few years have been made "a scapegoat for whatever one may not like at Dartmouth. I have been amused to hear students blame the Dartmouth Plan for problems that students complained about with the same vehemence 10 or 20 years ago."
But whatever the source or the seriousness of the problems, solutions for some are already in motion and recommendations for dealing with others are being solicited. The Committee on Education is meeting to study alternatives to the Dartmouth Plan. A greater structuring of the senior year, with only minor sacrifice of flexibility, is under consideration as a means of counteracting some of the disruption caused by varying patterns of terms in residence and off-campus. The requirement for one off-campus fall term is waived for students who can present sufficient cause - athletic schedules or the necessity of taking courses unavailable at other times, for instance. Departments are being urged to avoid concentration of required courses in the fall.
Perhaps the major point of friction has been fall overcrowding. Although actually fewer students were in residence last fall than three of the four previous falls, an unanticipated surge of interest in dormitory living has exacerbated the strain on campus housing that normally occurs in the fall. But the new dormitory authorized last month by the Trustees and continued use on a three-term basis of the Hanover Inn Motor Lodge as auxiliary student housing should alleviate that particular problem.
Opposite: a detail from an Italian baroquealtar rail recently donated to the Collegeby Ray Winfield Smith '18 and installed inthe newly renovated Carpenter Galleries.
