A Son's Reflections

THE indoctrinations experienced by a Chinese worker being "re-educated," an eager young man joining the Central Intelligence Agency, and an 18-year-old recruit entering boot camp are nothing compared with the lessons a Dartmouth alumnus hands down to his children.

Few are the Dartmouth sons and daughters who weren't reared on the strains of Dartmouth Undying, fed on plates displaying Sanborn Hall and Rollins Chapel, regaled with tales about Hanover winters and how many girls came to town for Winter Carnival, treated to Saturday morning excursions to the Orozco murals, and escorted to the third floor of New Hampshire Hall, or wherever the Dartmouth father spent his most memorable years.

And, it seems, deep in the Dartmouth alumnus' heart is a longing that someday his child will join his destiny with Dartmouth's and yell "To hell with Harvard!" — like his daddy used to do.

I suspect I'm not the only son of a son-of-a-gun-for-beer who grew up with the thought President Eisenhower expressed when he visited Hanover in 1953. "This," he said, gazing about the campus, "is what a college ought to look like."

When my father told me I could attend any college in the country whose admissions office would cooperate, he added, half-jokingly, "but I'll only pay for one." When I came of age we traveled to several eastern colleges, each more beautiful, more attractive, than the last. I remember my father's comments that "there really isn't a more beautiful campus in the world than Princeton's" and that "Williamstown is a wonderful community to live in for four years," but I suspect he really meant to say that Princeton is nice but it doesn't have Dartmouth Hall and Williamstown is pretty, a lot like some New Hampshire towns he's seen. But he had pledged to me — and to my mother, who still doesn't understand what another Dartmouth wife once called the Dartmouth Syndrome — that he would avoid pressuring his son to make what obviously was the right decision.

A year later I was a Dartmouth freshman, full of expectations about the place I had chosen as my college. It was an institution where there was a home football game every Saturday (we always won), where students fit studying around movies at the Nugget and coffee at Hap & Hal's, and where you learned a little about Madison, Mendelssohn, Machiavelli, Morley, Matisse, and maybe even Marx.

How astonished I was to learn that there were only four home games a year; there had been one, after all, every time I had visited Hanover. The old Nugget had burned down, a new one had been constructed and now, in my senior year, there's a Nugget 1 and a Nugget 2. What's more, it was no longer Hap & Hal's now it was just Hal's. And I found that life at Dartmouth revolved around courses, and some of them were hard.

Now I'm the one who's doing the re-educating, the indoctrinating, and I must admit it's a lot of fun. My parents come up to Hanover for periodic briefings about the state of the contemporary College, and I think we have more fun talking about what is different than we do about cataloguing what is the same.

We've agreed that it's no longer my father's college but, for next five months anyhow, my college, and that things are better now than they were, uh, back then. Examinations are no longer given upstairs in Alumni Gymnasium, and the gauntlet and most of fraternity hazing are gone. Telephone operators in White River Junction are now anonymous, and it's possible to get from Hanover to Boston in less than four hours without either going by DC-3 or taking Route 4 through Methuen. There are even women at Dartmouth and males and females really can be "just friends."

It's a thrill to live vicariously and many Dartmouth alumni, including, I think, my father, do. "You live it all again," William Rotch '37 wrote in the ALUMNI MAGAZINE 16 years ago, after his son entered the College. "The lawns are the same incredibel green that you remember, and the same students appear to be strolling across the campus."

That one's father loved, and loves, Dartmouth is, however, probably the worst reason to choose to attend Dartmouth. It can be nice if things work out — if the admissions office agrees with the alumnus that the College simply cannot survive without Johnnie or Susie; if Johnnie or Susie comes to Hanover and loves it, too; if the notes in the margins of the family copy of Paradise Lost give some helpful insights; and if parent and offspring are still talking by the end of sophomore year.

But often the admissions office comes between a student and what surely would have been a brilliant Dartmouth career, and the result is a lot of unnecessary bitterness. The father can't understand what they are doing up there in Hanover and decides he might skip the Princeton game next fall, while the applicant has to settle for what the alumnus insists are the lesser lights in higher education.

It's an understandable reaction, a credit to the College, and a measure of Dartmouth's impact upon her sons, but it's parochial nonetheless. It wasn't until recently that the thought there might be some fine colleges to the south of Lake Mascoma even occurred to me. There might even be some good ones to the west of the Connecticut River. Even now, I'm not sure.

My brother Jeffrey, Colby College '78, startled the family this fall when he suggested some people who are educated outside Hanover, New Hampshire, actually love their college, too. The shock waves from such a revolutionary statement nearly shattered the Dartmouth highball glass I was holding.

"... deep in the alumnus' heart is a longingthat someday his child will join his destiny withDartmouth's...."