Buried Alive
Six months ago I signed a form, gathered up my books, and marched into the Baker Library stacks, waving goodbye to my friends and relatives as I passed through the turnstiles. Descending two levels of stairs, I threaded my way between shelves of dusty volumes until I reached a corridor of olive-drab doors. My door was distinguished only by a muted "3L" from the bleak row of tightly spaced cubicles. An outsider might think these offices broom closets or monastic cells, and he could be correct. Writing an honors thesis at Dartmouth hardly guarantees a student "academic distinction, much less a comfortable office.
For three years I watched my predecessors with great curiosity as they entered and exited their dark crypts with mournful regularity. They were almost always alone, and had a look of oppression I have only recently come to understand. The initiation rites of this society more secret than Sphinx or Dragon seemed to involve typewriter whippings and utter claustrophobia. I would rather have gulped three glasses of "Beta Brew" than partake of this live burial.
The honors program in most academic departments at Dartmouth requires the submission of a fairly extensive work of research, known as a thesis. The honors student receives two course credits for this work, and has about six months in which to complete the project. There are easier ways to obtain two course credits, and there are certainly better ways to kill six months. Regardless of this punitive regimen, a significant number of undergraduates choose to act out their academic fantasies in this manner each year.
For those who take their projects seriously, this commitment to serious study can become a ponderous responsibility, hence the vampire-like midnight flights from the metal study-caskets. Most of us realize our limitations from the outset: Das Kapital was hardly the product of six months in an ill-heated office so small that one could break his arms merely by yawning in it. It was the product of over a decade in such an office, enough to make anyone a communist.
Not so long ago, nearly all Dartmouth students were required to produce a senior thesis. The History Department required such a project of its majors until 1964, and other departments made similar demands. The universal thesis had its advantages. Like the absence of women and the geographic isolation of Hanover, the senior thesis unified through common misery, engendering strong class unity if not scholarly masterpieces (or happy love lives). Athletics and the outdoors were predictably popular topics: "The History of the Dartmouth Soccer Team," for example. The quality of the required papers encompassed a whole spectrum, but longhand efforts of 10-15 pages were not unusual, with entire sections scratched out as a hasty afterthought. Professor Charles Wood of the History Department remembers some of the old theses. "Of course, you had some very good theses and some very bad theses," notes Wood. "Some guys were just doing what they had to in order to graduate." Certain papers, such as a study of American Indians seemingly drawn from comic books and John Wayne movies, were obviously the product of the last undergraduate moment.
Eventually, a saturation point was reached, and the thesis requirement was dropped. Comprehensive examinations were ended a few years later. Undergraduates had finally attained paradise, but still the thesis refused to die. Endowed with an honorific distinction - allowing certain students to graduate with high or highest honors in their major by submitting an acceptable thesis - what was once a common drudge became a rare boon. Only a handful of undergraduates qualified for the signal privilege of writing a thesis, since a certain grade-point average was required of honors majors. One wonders whether the administrators responsible for the metamorphosis of the undergraduate thesis also invited prospective "honors majors" over to their houses for honorific house painting sessions, a la Tom Sawyer.
Writing over 100 reasonably cogent and well-documented pages is not all fun and games, though most of us survive the experience. Finding a reasonable topic is in itself a project. My study of railroad efficiency in fascist Italy was derailed by the discovery that Mussolini did not make the trains run on time. Luckily, I have developed a strange interest in the biological and psychological problems of ruling families in 16th-century Western Europe. Inbred, diseased, and psychotic, these people dominate my thoughts to an almost frightening extent. Last week I dreamed that a descendant of Henry VIII survived - ruining my elaborate theory of dynastic destruction. I woke up in a cold sweat. I also dreamed that I was typing the word "and" over and over again in my study. "And" is presently the only word I can type without looking at the keys, so now I'm hesitant to learn more erudite words, since they would be even more nettling repeated in a dream like that.
The phenomenon of "experimenter bias" crops up time and again in my research. I really don't enjoy reading descriptions of gruesome deaths and perverted behavior, at least not before bedtime, but the discovery of such episodes in original source material makes my life considerably easier. As the end of the term looms, I confess that I am hoping to find premature demises, crib deaths, and even miscarriages as I root through the evidence left by Scotland's royal Stewarts. These unfortunate events cut down the number of cases I have to research, and lend credence to my theory that 16th-century ruling families followed courses of action disastrous to their health, mental stability, and dynastic survival.
Dartmouth is frequently criticized, both by insiders and outsiders, as an anti-intellectual environment. On the surface this may be true, but I must confess that I haven't felt deprived because we don't discuss Reinhold Niebuhr in the dining hall, or quote Ovid on Friday nights. There is a time and a place for everything, as Mary Stewart reportedly said to the Earl of Bothwell. The honors program provides an avenue for students genuinely interested in pursuing serious research, and the library is (almost) always open. The possibilities are endless, as are the different responses to the possibilities offered by Dartmouth.
