Gone Today, Here Tomorrow

It seemed as if a lot of our sophomore friends were not in their usual haunts this spring. So on a hunch we asked around the registrar's office if the sophomore class as a whole tends to take the spring term off before returning to Hanover for the mandatory summer in residence. The man who used to keep track of such things with paper and pencil looked over his prodigious computer print-out - "the computer's a wonderful thing, you know" - and told us the score: Only 600 members of 1980, a little more than half the class, are around to soak up the ambiance of the Connecticut Valley spring this year.

We supposed that a standard Dartmouth Plan might have evolved, but that notion was quickly dispelled by a second look at the computer record. It showed a mindboggling assortment of enrollment patterns - from bathing in Barbados to hanggliding in Haiti, as it were. People seem to want to do these things at different times. In a recent year the most common Dartmouth Plan had only 17 takers (out of a class of over 1,000 students). Another line on the print-out indicated that for 2,300 undergraduates there were well over a thousand different enrollment patterns. No wonder we don't see people around these days.

The respective class councils have, in recent years, encouraged their classmates to spend the summer following their sophomore year in Hanover in the interest of class solidarity. Most of the same students stay around for the fall term of their junior year, and so, to break up what could be a tiresome stretch of successive terms, they head for the territories in the sophomore spring. It's all right there on the computer.