PARTYING: A PEER REVIEW

A BRIEF EXPOSITION of campus SOCIAL LIFE in which a University of Chicago student EXAMINES the quesion, Is DARTMOUTH the RAGING ID of ELITE colleges?

WHEN WE WERE LOOKING for an objective observer to write about Dartmouth's social life, we naturally turned to the University of Chicago, a place where the library is the center of fun. We invited John Scalzi, who graduated last spring with a degree in philosophy, to come to Dartmouth for Green Key Weekend.—Ed.

AS AN OUTSIDER LOOKING IN, you hear things about Dartmouth that you don't hear about most schools. Much of this has to do with the fact that it's in the Ivy League, which automatically classifies it as royalty among colleges.1 Like any member of royalty, its movements and activities are open to public scrutiny, and those activities generally make for good copy.

Through lore, movies, and magazine articles, Dartmouth has developed a reputation, and it's not for selling Girl Scout cookies. Simply put, it's the Raging Id of the first-tier college set. God forbid, if all of our colleges were personified and sent to a New Year's Eve party, Dartmouth would be the one with a lampshade on its head and its prep-school tie soaking in its beer stein.

My own beloved U of C doesn't have a very good reputation either, but for reasons opposite of Dartmouth's. If Chicago were at that same New Year's Eve party, it'd be sitting alone in the den, reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica and trying to figure out how to get up the nerve to talk to that cutie from Yale without wetting its pants.

Now, the U of C isn't exclusively populated by socially inept slide rule slingers any more than Dartmouth is exclusively populated by inebriated boys with Greek letters branded into their flesh. But by the same token, it is true that Chicago's library is the social center of the campus. For one thing, it's centrally located, and, besides, if you must study (and, at the U of C, you must), you might as well make it as painless as possible.

I wanted to come to Dartmouth because, after hearing so much about the place, I wanted to separate what the institution is from what it's been made out to be; to see if it actually lived up (or, depending on your view, down) to its press.

Camped out in the Alumni Magazine offices, I was committed to getting to know the real Dartmouth. And if I had to go to every single party and event during the weekend to do it, well then, darn it, I could sleep on the plane ride back.

AS IT HAPPENED, the weekend it was most convenient for me to visit was Green Key Weekend, that frenzied, three-day festival that is the social highlight of the spring term. While Green Key is not exactly what you would call representative of the typical weekend at Dartmouth (and if it is, boy, did I spend four years at the wrong place), it had the advantage of throwing the gears of Dartmouth's social life into sharp relief.

It immediately occurred to me that Green Key Weekend wouldn't happen at my school. The U of C is in an urban area, so the pressure for home-grown entertainment is less. And Chicago students are wary, in general, about attending University-sponsored events. Patronizing a University event is like spending a day with grandmother, and, really, who wants to do that?

There seems to be no such stigma attached to Dartmouth's events, which are all meticulously planned, arranged, and attended, as if fan were going to be outlawed tomorrow. The seriousness with which Dartmouth takes its fan is phenomenal, which is why students from other colleges and universities actually make the trek through the New Hampshire wilds to attend the party.

I was struck by the fact that Green Key Weekend is more than just another excuse to get roaringly smashed on a random May weekend (though that is what, in part, it truly is). Like the school itself, it seems to be surrounded in myth and legend. For one, Green Key Weekend began in 1899, even though the Green Key Society didn't begin until the early 1920s (showing either remarkable prescience on the part of the institution or laziness in the copy editing of the Daily D). Events like Chariot Races and Lulu McWhoosh's midnight bike ride in the nude in either 1924 or 1931 (depending on whose legend you believe) have all been punted into Dartmouth lore.

The Green Key Weekend of today didn't seem to have the same richness to it in terms of myth making activities. But you never know. Ten years from now they may be talking about the good old days when they used to heave beer kegs around the Green like true Olympians.

SPEAKING OF OLYMPIANS, a large segment of the Green Key Weekend activities revolve around the Greek scene: the Hums, the Greek Games, and, of course, the individual parties themselves. This is only fair, as a lion's share of Dartmouth's reputation is based on the activities of these organizations.

You should know from the start that I don't think too highly of the Greek system in general. When I was at the U of C, some friends and I formed a fraternity called Delta lota Mu (the acronym pretty much sums up what we thought of Greek life). Dartmouth's hallowed fraternity system didn't do much for me either. As far as I can see, the Greek life of Dartmouth is indistinguishable from the Greek life of most schools around the nation. You drink, you bond, you occasionally rouse yourself to do community service, and there you are.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that the entire Greek system is superfluous (although it is tempting), and it would be an outright lie to say that Dartmouth's fraternities and sororities don't fill an important niche in the school's social life. But wood putty fills a niche, too, you know. It just doesn't look good doing it. The entire concept of Greek life is bland and homogenized, the McDonald's of college social life: they're everywhere you go, and all of them basically serve the same damn thing.

Having said that, Dartmouth's Greek organizations serve up the same damn thing pretty well. The Hums were in the grand tradition of fraternity sings everywhere, and I got a kick out of the participants' finding new and innovative ideas to talk about the same thing: planning to drink and/or drinking and/or recovering from same. One song did talk about the problems the class of '91 was going to have finding jobs in a recession, but all that did was make all of us entering the job market want to have a drink.

The Greek Games were also fun, although they limited nonmembers to spectator status. But that's okay by me; everyone knows it's more fun to watch burly Greeks suck jello through a coffee stirrer than it is to actually do it yourself. But the Hums and the Greek Games are window dressing for the fraternities' and sororities' main contribution to Green Key Weekend: their parties.

I went to six fraternity parties during my short stay at Dartmouth, and my experience at these parties confirmed what I already knew about myself: that I can tolerate a fraternity party for about 20 minutes on the outside. At which point I begin wishing for a bat so that I might beat some sense into the heads of my fellow partygoers.

Fraternity parties depress the hell out of me because, after four years and numerous fraternity parties at several colleges and universities, I have yet to go to a fraternity party whose underlying purpose was not to propel its constituency headlong into stupidity. You see, I have never needed a peer group to help me get stupid. I can usually do it all by myself. For the record, the best party I went to was at Psi U, which in addition to being only slightly less crowded than a Tokyo subway train had an extremely fine blues band to boot. Infamous AD's Infamous Party on the Lawn was also a skull ripper, and showed what respect Dartmouth students have for their dogs: AD's lawn was covered with dancers except for the spots where the AD dogs had decided to nap; these were given a wide berth. Wacky. The least successful party I attended was Phi Tau's, which had devolved by the time I got there to a small group of people tossing a ping-pong ball across a table.

Of course, I came to Dartmouth at a time when it was difficult to be a fraternity. Green Key Weekend was awash with rumors that Hanover's Finest were planning yet another sting operation, hoping to nail some unsuspecting frat to the wall when it gave a brewski to the wrong undercover cop. This paranoia blocked my entrance to Zete's party ("University of Chicago?" the doorman said, as if I had asked for Prince Albert in a can) and would have kept me from at least two others, if not for a Dartmouth student who vouched for me at one, and a well-placed lie ("I'm a friend of the guitarist") at another.

AS YOU MAY HAVE GUESSED, the best parties I attended at Dartmouth were not Greek events. One was formed specifically as an alternative to that scene. The second just sort of happened.

The first party was the Friday Night Dance Club, which is held in the Collis Center. It was more fun than a fraternity party. Nobody was drinking on the dance floor, so the floor didn't become sticky, lubricated, and otherwise gross. Best of all, there were absolutely no litde dollops of beer from plastic cups falling into my clothing, followed by distinctly pro forma apologies. Actually, nobody was drinking, period. Also, the music was more fun to dance to. Not to denigrate the live bands at the fraternity parties, most of which showed a frightening level of competency, but it's nice to dance to a song that was recorded in the nineties.

EVEN MORE FUN for me was the party that I attended as the guest of a newly acquired Dartmouth friend. It was a party of friends, held in a cramped apartment that its owner, with no small sense of sarcasm, dubbed "The Love Shack." It was at the Love Shack that I saw the only cat in Hanover3 being shoved into a broom closet before it could freak out over the fact that about 20 people were stuffed into a ten- by-ten living room.

I enjoyed the party because everyone knew each other and was willing to give me, a friend of a friend, the benefit of the doubt. Everyone was relaxed in each other's presence; I didn't know how relaxed until two women arrived, resplendent in matching clown suits, much to the astonishment of absolutely no one in the room. No one even bothered to notice until I asked one of the women about her suit, to which she responded (of course), "What suit?" This is my kind of party, where people are people, and not just blots whom you see on the dance floor. I spent a lot of time talking to people about their school. I listened to a '94 explain his fraternity choices, and we argued pros and cons about fraternity life. I talked to a bisexual student about some recent events at the U of C concerning gay harassment, and asked about the alternative lifestyles at Dartmouth. And I just basically blabbed and listened to other people do the same. It was a very satisfying experience, and it couldn't have happened anywhere else. It was the most "Dartmouth" event I attended.

I'VE BEEN7 TOLD that one of the upshots of Dartmouth's isolation from the world is that it makes dating nonexistent. After all, Hanover has a finite number of restaurants, movie theaters, and bars, and after you and your date have hit them all, the known world begins to shrink at a geometric rate, leaving you and your loved one sitting, dazed, in front of an episode of "L.A. Law." I'll buy this theory up to a point, but I did see quite a few reasonably happy-looking couples trundling across the Green during Green Key Weekend, and something tells me that they didn't just get together through a system of primitive hand gestures and inarticulate grunts.

But there's no question that you guys are in the boonies. It can take Vermont Transit five hours to get to Hanover from Boston, if the driver is feeling sadistic, and believe me, he usually is. And just south of the local supermarket, the town of Hanover simply stops, with nary a gas station for architectural punctuation. It doesn't even bother to peter out; it just stops. Dartmouth is an island in a sea of second-growth forest.

Who to blame? None other than Eleazar "I Don't Like Neighbors" Wheelock, who intentionally founded his little school as far away from civilization as he could, the better to shield his charges from the temptations of worldly pleasures.

I think Eleazar would be pleased by the fact that lunning the lanes at Astro Bowl still rates as urbane entertainment in these here parts. But your illustrious founder, for all his wisdom and learning, seems to have forgotten one nearly tautological truth: isolating college-age men and women from sin and iniquity doesn't work. It simply encourages them to manufacture their own.

This little factoid is why I believe you've managed to generate the reputation you have. It's the residue of attempting to relieve 222 years of screaming boredom out there in the sticks, where you're so far out that much of your local TV news has to be imported from Massachusetts.

But Dartmouth students do seem to be very good at keeping themselves entertained here in the North Woods. For example, during the Spring Sing, a concert of a cappella groups that was performed during Green Key Weekend (and which still astounds me, months later), a member of the all-female Decibelles did the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life: she took a wire coathanger, stretched it out into a diamond shape with the hook upside down, balanced a penny horizontally on the hook, and then spun the coathanger, with penny still balanced on the hook, all the time singing the "Toys 'R' Us" theme4 —backwards.

Now, impressive as the feat was, she really must have been really, really bored at some point during the preceding academic quarter. Why else would a presumably sane human being even consider learning to do something like that?

IT F YOU STOP and talk to people about their j school (which I had to do; knowing no one, I had to start somewhere), you notice that, while they might get their hackles up at the things that happen here or at the reputation the place has ("Hey, you're not going to write just about the fraternities, are you?" I was asked, over and over again), almost everyone I talked to truly seems to bond to the place.

During Green Key Weekend, I had the pleasure of receiving a tour of the campus from a freshman gentleman who was obviously in love with Dartmouth. We went up to the top of Baker Library, and as we stood looking out at the hills, my guide had the damnedest smile on his face, a grin like a categorical imperative: he ought to have been at Dartmouth. It did more to explain what Dartmouth was all about than most of the discussions I had while I was there.

AT ABOUT 4:30 IN THE MORNING, the morning I was to leave Dartmouth after my Green Key Weekend experience, I decided to take a walk around campus. Your campus, you should know, is incredibly dark at night; if it had been Chicago, I would've been mugged about eight times between the magazine office and Kiewit. As it was, I nearly killed myself twice by stumbling through the thin ropes positioned kneehigh around the grass in front of Baker.

This was the time in which I would have to quantify Dartmouth, to get some sort of grip on the place. Those of you who cherish your school's Bad Boy of the Ivies image needn't worry. I had too much fun during Green Key Weekend, enough so that I must seriously consider doing some form of penance. Dartmouth's reputation, I concluded, can be misleading and dishonest. Some of what was most uniquely Dartmouth in my mind were things that the school's reputation doesn't touch on: the bonds between students and their school, the Spring Sing concert, the Collis Dance Club. And some of those things that the school's social reputation rests on, the fraternities and sororities, didn't ring true to me as fully Dartmouth.

As I continued to progress through the campus, only now occasionally injuring myself as the sky began to lighten, I was more than a little surprised at how attached I had become to the place in the three days I was there. I even bought a Dartmouth shirt, and I don't even have one from U of C.

Personally, I'm glad I came. I might even want to drop by again some day. After all, there's still Homecoming and Winter Carnival.

1 If we assume, as we must, that Harvard is King, Dartmouth ranks somewhere around a Grand Duke. This may annoy some, but it is certainly better than, say, Brown, which barely qualifies as the Court Jester.

2 I also found it mildly upsetting that they all also had the same pet: a large dog with a bandanna wrapped around its neck. As far as I can tell, there are no dogs smaller than a pointer in all of Hanover, which makes you wonder what happened to all the lit- tle dogs. A children's story forms in my head: SPARKY, THE SMALLEST DOG IN HANOVER "Hi!" Sparky said. "I'm a Pomeranian, and I'm the smallest dog in Hanover!" "Hello," said Bruno. "I'm a Rottweiler." And he ate him. So much for that.

3 cf. Sparky, The Smallest Dog in Hanover.

4 "I don't want to grow up/ I'm a Toys 'R' Us kid/ They've got a million toys at Toys 'R' Us/ That I can play with..."

IF CHICAGO were at aparty, it would be ALONE in THE DEN with theencyclopedia and gettingup THE NERVE to talkto that cutie from YALE.

DARTMOUTH'S eventsare all METICULOUSLY planned, ARRANGED, and ATTENDED as if FUN were going to be OUTLAWED tomorrow.