Steps Forward and Backward

Frat row is getting a face lift. The current thrust of the president's concern to refurbish the fraternity and sorority system at Dartmouth is a beautification program for Webster Avenue, where most of the fraternities on campus are housed. The $111,000 plan includes a new sewer system, a roadbed replacement and complete repaving, new sidewalks, curbing, colonial-style street lights, and the burial of all utility lines.

The town of Hanover and the College will share the costs of the project, a side benefit of which is going to be a major improvement of the existing sewer system. While the road is up, Buildings and Grounds is tearing out the old pressure system, whereby sewage was pumped to the treatment plant along a strangely circuitous route that involved a swing around the golf course. The old system is being replaced by a gravity-feed system that will connect things up more directly through Tuck Drive and will also call at the new Rockefeller Center on its way to treatment. That, according to Assistant Business Manager John Donovan, will save the College a tidy sum.

Donovan is especially appreciative of the way the house members have taken all the disruption: "They've had to move their dumpsters away from convenient locations, some houses have had all their parking taken away and have had to double up elsewhere, and they've put up with mud, dirt, and dust all summer. They have been very cooperative and supportive." Donovan expects the new road to be passable by Harvard game time and the entire project to be completed by the end of October.

Another facet of the president's plan to upgrade the system is a new incentive program designed to appeal to donors. Under the program, currently being studied for approval by 1.R.5., fraternities and sororities would have the option of leasing their houses to the College, which would then lease them back to the fraternities and sororities, all on a 50-year basis. The arrangement would put capital gifts to fraternities and sororities into the tax-free category, and the hope is that financial support for the houses would start cropping up everywhere.

Other news on the fraternity front indicates some setbacks, however. Disciplinary sanctions have recently been imposed on two fraternities, and another part of the clean-up plan a housekeeping chart that came out of Donovan's office nas raised student hackles. Donovan's candid assessment of the housekeeping chart situation is that he blew it: "I take responsibility for the hostility. I created it by not going through the process. The students' anger is totally justified, and I've got to clean things up with the leadership and house managers."

It will take some work, Donovan says, to break out of the position-taking habit the fraternities and the administration have fallen into and to establish a working relationship, an alignment instead of an opposition. "I'm convinced we want the same things," he said, and his analysis sounded, on the whole, positive. The housekeeping chart could be one of those tiny steps backward that precede a big step forward.

The old hands sang in the new with feeling at convocation.