The college makes it easy for non-fraternity men to entertain their dates by allowing women in the dormitories until midnight on week nights and one o'clock Sunday morning. "If you want to keep things going," says one junior, "there are some resort gains a few miles away for all night blanket parties."
About 40 percent of the men belong to fraternities, all of them upperclassmen. Unlike some mid-western universities. Dartmouth has been careful not to let the Greek letters dominate campus politics. Fraternity men do not band together to back their own candidates for office or foist their whims on a neglected student body. In the tremendous camaraderie that is Dartmouth life, they fail even to develop the exclusive clannishness for which they are most often criticized.
A scant two years ago, John Sloan Dickey became president of the college, and since that time he has done some face-lifting in Hanover that has also lifted some eyebrows among the conservative Dartmouth family.
Revamps Room Assignments
He has put an end to the policy of lumping minority groups in rooms together. Unless they specifically request such an assignment, Negros, Jews, and Catholics no longer know with grim certainty that their roommates will be respectively Negros, Jews, and Catholics.
Up to the time Dickey took office, sons of Alumni were virtually guaranteed a place in the college. Somebody figured out then that by 1970 there would not be room for all those sons of Dartmouth, much less for outsiders. The new president seized the argument and soon tapered off the circular inbreeding. The once-privileged sons now go through the same admissions interviews as anyone else.
Personally, Dickey has brought to Hanover an informality unknown during the 29-year tenure of President Hopkins. Dickey, who in 1929 was still a Big Green undergraduate, has forsaken Hopkins' sleek, presidential limousine for a sturdy little jeep. He has been known to pitch in with the snow shoveling squads and has been variously photographed with dogs, a genuine Dartmouth Indian baby, and a broad chief executive smile. Undergraduates who are not afraid of him like him.
Great Issues Project
Dickey's pet project is the Great Issues course which is required of all seniors. Designed to bring the foundation knowledge of the first three college years into sharp focus on the great national and international problems of the world. Great Issues offers lecturers like Archibald MacLeish. Lewis Mumford, and President Conant. It gives the men of Dartmouth a common cultural experience to match the enthusiastic social solidarity fostered by for years of living and working together in Hanover.