Quelle Difference

Some 250 men and women across the country are boning up these days on the work of such diverse writers as Shakespeare and Ken Kesey, part of their homework for the 14th annual Alumni College, August 7 through 18. During that summer interval they will ponder the provocative question, "Men and Women: What's the Difference?"

"A few organisms are hermaphroditic, at once male and female, but most are either one or the other," a circumstance which - as James Epperson, professor of English and the academic director of Alumni College, points out - not only "doubled Noah's ark-building costs," but "has continued to be a problem for the rest of us." For this summer's students that problem will raise such questions as: Do basic biological differences mean that there are "natural" modes of male and female behavior? Or are such differences merely matters of custom, the result of social and economic impositions which amount to a tacit, historic, male and female conspiracy to concoct distinctions where none truly exist? "Put another way," Epperson says, "do men and women really have differing attitudes toward business, politics, the family, sports, clothes, love and sex, money, education - toward everything?"

This year's faculty, in addition to Epperson, will include Peggy Hock and Lawrence Morin of the Psychology Department; Joy Kenseth of the Art Department; Mai-Lan Rogoff, a psychiatrist at the Medical School and director of the Human Sexuality Program at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Mental Health Center; and Manon Spitzer, a historian-editor with the American Universities Field Staff in Hanover.

Participants, as in the past, will attend two lectures and a group discussion each morning. Afternoons will be free for further intellectual pursuits, for sports, or simply for luxuriating in the Hanover summer. Some special events are scheduled for the evenings, and the variety of Hopkins Center programs in music, drama, art, and film is there for the attending. Meanwhile, the youngsters who accompany their parents are enrolled in the junior program under the supervision of Dartmouth students.

Alumni collegians probably won't come up with a definitive answer to the question of differences - and similarities - between men and women, but they will surely carry home with them better intellectual armor for the continuing battle of the sexes.