Checking the Competition

"Nobody knows what's going on in chaplaincies," said Warner Traynham '57, dean of Dartmouth's Tucker Foundation and chaplain of the College, "so I decided to take a sabbatical and find out." Traynham recently returned from a study tour to 17 colleges and universities across the nation, where he went "to check out the competition" and to pick up ideas for improvement at home. He was particularly interested in student-faculty interaction at other institutions and in how their chaplaincies are coping with alcoholism, sexism, and racism.

"I looked at residential life programs, too," said Traynham. Almost all of the schools he visited had some such program, at the minimum an office of student life that coordinated the activities of student advisers resident in dorms and at the maximum a progam based on the residence in dormitories of administrators and faculty and student-affairs professionals. "We are missing out on that resource," he said. "We do badly there." Dartmouth has particular need for a strong dormitory procram, according to Traynham, because of the fragmenting effect of the Dartmouth Plan.

He spoke approvingly of the Yale model of residential colleges each with a professor as master and a segment of the faculty living in the college as fellows, but he thought it inappropriate for Dartmouth: "It is fantastically expensive, and here we could expect half the faculty to rise in revolt if We tried it. But Stanford has a mixed model, in which most of the faculty are resident next to dorms, and a few live in dorms. That we might look at."

Traynham was impressed by the crossgenerational interaction he encountered at other schools. "I'm not talking just about faculty and students," he explained. "The point is the intergenerational contact ― with coaches, staff, members of the administration, with adult models in general." He cited Emory's university refectory: "Faculty, students, graduate students eat there cheek-by-jowl. The refectory isn't perceived, as the dining hall here is, as student turf. Some such design for the crossing of paths between generations is the key to working with problems in a day-to-day way that doesn't require moratoriums."

As to alcohol, Traynham observed, almost everyone thinks there is a problem on campus. "Hardly anyone is doing anything about it of which he or she is confident, though. One chaplain I met said, 'Yes, we have an alcohol program so that we can say we have one.' " Only once did Traynham hear of a solution to handling alcohol on campuses. That was at the only institution where Traynham encountered a full-time alcohol teacher, and he refused to pass on his ideas unless he was hired as a consultant. "One result of my trip, commented Traynham, "was the inSlght that part of what we regard as an alcohol problem is a normal testing of limits by adolescents who have been told that they re at college now and the wraps are off. In some sense, colleges have a built-in alcohol problem."

With a couple of exceptions, reported Traynham, the institutions he visited professed to have little or no problem with sexism at the undergraduate level. "Of course," he added, "affirmative action problems at the staff level are übiquitous. There is also an apparent increase in the incidence of rape."

Traynham, who is black himself, found Dartmouth much further advanced in the matter of race relations than he expected, both in the ratio of minorities to others and in the level of tranquillity (if not interaction). "At Dartmouth, unlike at large state universities, black and white people are culturally very much like each other," he said. "The races at Dartmouth are not necessarily buddy-buddy, but over the seven and a half years that I have been here, the level of black disaffection with the white community has declined."

However, continued Traynham, white students' perceptions of blacks have not kept pace: "Most white students here think the current black students are like those who were on campus three or four years ago. Even then they were aspirants to the middle class; but now they actually are middle class. Now there is an incredible number of black students who went to substantially white prep schools, and those are the ones who come to Dartmouth, Yale, etc. Why, the Third World Center at Brown was set up partly to expose minority students to minority students, who often become fascinated with minority culture because it's the first time they've encountered it, not necessarily because they are rejecting white culture."

As to the chaplaincy competition, Traynham was reassured. "When I asked the chaplain at Brown to suggest where I might visit to find other programs similar to the Tucker Foundation, he told me that there was nothing else like the Tucker foundation. Most chaplaincies are very narrowly conceived, whereas in terms of size, resources, conception, and overall impact, we are distinctive. We pull together a number of things usually independent, and most people I talked to were surprised at the extent of our foundation and service projects."

Of course, he said, many places have much better chapel attendance than Dartmouth does ― but those places are ones that have never stopped having chapel requirements or ones with a denominational affiliation. Traynham intends to try at Dartmouth a ministerial idea he got from Kalamazoo ing" a non-denominational week-day convocation to provide a focus for the spiritual and ethical concerns of the academic community. "Will it fly?' mused Traynham. "I don't know. The Sunday service is not doing very well. The trouble with being a voluntary organization is that you are always preaching to the converted. But when it comes to moral and ethical concerns, everybody is in the pot, and I came back repersuaded of the value of a united ministry."

Traynham is not afraid that recent cuts in the Tucker Foundation budget will reduce Dartmouth's chaplaincy to the level of others ― at least not right away. "The Tucker fellows program, ten or so undergraduate placements, is gone," he explained, "and so are the Upper Valley internships ―but we always had problems with those anyway, and maybe it's better to do them through the Dartmouth Community Service program. The Jersey City program, with its 30 placements, is being retained for the present. We are looking for ways to integrate the foundation into campus life, and if the new dorm cluster proposal being considered is adopted and includes resident advisers, we will have a great new resource."

Traynham: Among the competition, he foundnothing quite like the Tucker Foundation.