Something Different

Early in November, a hundred or so alumni - leadership area chairmen, class campaign coordinators, major gifts committeemen, and such - came to town for a convocation. Their business here was the Campaign for Dartmouth.

The convocation lasted three days in all. There were the usual workshop meetings for the various committees, and there were speeches with such titles as "Financing the College" and "The Campaign and the Future." There was something different, too.

The idea was to let the alumni volunteers stray a bit from fund-raising goals and techniques and spend a full day with real live students and real live professors. The students and the professors had a chance to say why they are here and just what it is that they do here. There was time for straight talk about problems and achievements. The volunteers for the Campaign for Dartmouth, the people whose job it is to raise the better part of $160 million, asked some tough questions, and they seemed satisfied by the answers.

In the late afternoon, students hosts - one per alumnus - took the visitors to several dormitories and a couple of fraternity houses for what were called Student Receptions. They drank some punch and talked some more. Then they went to dinner at Thayer Hall. Thayer Hall! The visitors and their student hosts waited in line like everybody else, looked uneasily at something brownish called "mushroom chowder," and played with the soft ice cream machines. The students and the alumni seemed to have a good time together.