Harvard Myths About Dartmouth

Erich Segal, Harvard '58, Ph.D. '64, taught at his alma mater and then for several years at Yale. Most recently he was professor of classics at Princeton and will this fall be visiting professor of classics and comparative literature at Dartmouth. The reader is advised that Professor Segal has composed these animadversions in what he calls a "jockular" vein.

THE HARVARD undergraduate of the late 50s held the following truths about Dartmouth men to be self-evident:

(1) They are immature

My earliest memory of the college in Hanover is of a long-ago Saturday morning when I awoke and peered out of my Dunster House window. Mirabile visu, I espied huge Green "Ds" scrawled drippingly on the splendorous Weeks Footbridge.

It was, needless to say, the morn of the Harvard-Dartmouth gridiron grapple. The authors of these lapidary graffitti had obviously intended a sort of pre-game "gotcha" (to use a then current locution).

"Ugh," exclaimed my roommate, with his usually eloquent turning of phrase, "the children are in town."

Witty sophomore that I was, I added that the Green Meanies seemed incapable of entire sentences, inasmuch as their message lacked not only subject, verb, and object, but was in fact less than monosyllabic.

"I guess they haven't gotten to the vowels yet," I quipped.

"Ho ho," quoth my roommate, himself the master of several other sophisticated ejaculations. His superior laugh was indeed, "de 'ho' en bas," as Molière might have put it (if he were drunk).

(2) They are mere jocks

They mangled us in football that day.

But of course Harvard esprit can turn even a sour cream into a Chantilly. Witness the semi-apocryphal repartee between Crimson vanquished and Green victor.

"I'm so glad you fellows won," says the Cantabridgian to the Hanoverian, "I mean you people need that sort of thing so much."

Faiblesse oblige.

(3) They are monastically "deprived"

This is the logical conclusion to be drawn from (1) and (2).

To overcompensate for the lack of aesthetic stimulation (i.e., girls), the jocks turned inexorably to asceticism and its inevitable end-run result: athleticism. A sound body and a muscular mind. As Juvenal didn't say. In order to "get their rocks off" (a locution not yet invented at the time), they had to throw the shot. Or the football. Or themselves into a pool.

A disinterested scientific mind could have argued that Dartmouth simply had better teams than we did. But, as Harvardmen well know, truth is often incompatible with snobbery. Which is why our motto is Veritas. (We had to get it in somewhere.)

(4) They are "wild off the reservation"

Please recall that in the pre-socially conscious 60s, you still were called Indians. This designation seemed all the more apt, owing to the phenomena observed in (1), (2), and (3).

In the years when the four-minute mile was still the ultimate challenge on foot, the two-hour voyage from Hanover to Wellesley was its automotive counterpart. Even with today's splendid new roads, I still cannot reach Dartmouth from Boston in less than 2:15. In those virtually stagecoach days, the feat must have been worthy of Jackie Stewart. Yet many claimed times even faster.

Was this fact or fiction?

Only the highway policemen know for sure.

But clearly, speed was of the essence, owing to, especially, (3).

(5) They are boozers

Again, this would seem the natural result of numbers 1-4. And indeed it is a myth that dies hard. Hard as liquor, one might say. Cartesian philosophers might argue that (5) is a direct contradiction of (2). But then the medicinal value of beer is now well attested, in the journals. And on the eve of big games, jocks are known to be relatively abstinent.

Of course an athletic victory justifies alcoholic excess.

And a loss can justify drowning one's sorrows.

In short, owing to their isolation, deprivation, athleticism, wildness, and other sociologically determinable factors, Dartmouth men on occasion drink a lot.

(6) They indulge in (5) because they are bored silly living in theboondocks

Now any geographer can tell you that Dartmouth is in no proximity to any polis, metro- or megalo-. Any demographer will tell you that Hanover has less joie de vivre than, say, Paris or Nero's ballroom. But these facts unbalance a picture. For I once visited Hanover as an undergraduate.

'Twas the February weekend I was running the mile against the Indians.

So accustomed was I to the noise of Cambridge traffic, that the odd sound of snowflakes smashing onto the earth kept me awake all night. Next day en route to the track, I was struck by the tranquil beauty of the campus in winter. (I even saw some guys studying — an obvious plant by the college PR office;) I mean the place actually seemed nice.

I was destroyed in the mile by runners whose names I have chosen to erase. And en route home I rationalized my ignominious performance by arguing that "the place" had literally thrown me off stride.

I forget who won the meet.

I forget my time (happily).

But I still remember the snow.

Lovely to visit, but you wouldn't want to ... live there.

Yet to conclude: given (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), & (6), why do I genuinely look forward to teaching at Hanover this fall?

First of all, it is 1976, not '56. Tempora mutantur. And temperaments. Mine as well as Dartmouth's.

On the physical level the isolation of Dartmouth now seems splendid. It is a locus amoenus. It is a Platonic paradise for thought. I will be like Petrarch atop Mt. Ventoux, aloft in splendid contemplation.

When Professor Steve Nichols invited me to Dartmouth, it was over lunch in the Princeton Faculty Club, in what is still renowned as an idyllic campus. A Tiger professor of French was with us. For his own sake I withhold his identity while disclosing his remark: "Dartmouth," he said, "has the ambiance Princeton dreams of." He said ambiance without a French accent so I know he was serious.

Then of course there is the matter of Kemeny's coming. Somebody with a concept of what a modern college should be. I don't know the first thing about computers, but I look forward to learning from my students.

And let us not depreciate coeducation. I lived through the entire process at Yale; I saw its beginnings at Princeton. Whatever grumbles one hears about what it may do to the Big Green hockey team, it is the most important act since the founding of the college. Das Ewig-Weibliche will indeed bring all to higher goals.

But most important for me personally, I long ago learned that the Harvard Myths about Dartmouth were fictive elaborations on a minor theme. In almost a decade of teaching in the Yale Graduate School, I again and again saw Hanover men heartily welcomed and mightily achieving.

And so for me there is no refuge in numbers 1-6.

I simply hope I'll do better in the Dartmouth classroom than I did on the track in ancient days.

Author Segal conveniently forgets that in Love Story OliverBarrett IV and his hockey mates "creamed" the bully-boys fromHanover, 7-0.

As for myths, sample this bit of dialogue from the novel:

" 'Listen, you snotty Radcliffe bitch, Friday night is the Dartmouth hockey game.'

'So.''So I'd like you to come.'She replied with the usual Radciiffe reverence for sport:

'Why the hell should I come to a lousy hockey game?I answered casually:'Because I'm playing.'There was a brief silence. I think I heard snow falling.'For which side?' she asked."

Dartmouth or Harvard? Clue: check the lacy filigree.

Bookish: Harvard sizes up Radcliffe, 1968.