College students often grumble about the problems that the Dartmouth-Plan causes in their lives: long separations from significant others, a lack of stability in housing and the destruction of the community at the College.
But when the College adopted the D-Plan in 1971, the program was actually seen as the solution to a rather difficult problem the College faced at the time.
When the College finally decided it was ready to take the plunge and become fully coeducational in the early 1970s, it faced a dilemma: how to admit 1,000 female students without building new facilities or decreasing the number of male students at the College.
The D-Plan solved this dilemma by creating a year-round academic calendar that included a summer quarter, which maximized the usage of the College's facilities. The D-Plan enabled Dartmouth to expand at a time when it could not have afforded to construct more buildings or increase the size of its faculty.
Journalists and educators predicted that with Dartmouth leading the way, the rest of the Ivy League, other colleges and even secondary schools would soon depart from the outmoded agriculturally-based academic calendar and adopt the more efficient plan for year-round operation.
In an interview with Boston journalists in 1971, then-College President John Kemeny said year-round operation "could have tremendous national significance. If applied to secondary schools, it could help solve overcrowding problems without costing a great deal of money."
Yet 24 years after the D-Plan's adoption, Dartmouth remains the only major institution of higher education which operates on a year-round calendar.
"It is the compulsory Summer term that makes the calendar at Dartmouth unique," Acting College President James Wright said in a recent interview with The Dartmouth.
"Beloit College in Wisconsin used to have a somewhat similar year-round program, but they no longer do it. Yale was looking into it, but there is no provision for a compulsory Summer term," Wright said.
The explanation for this uniqueness can be found in the historical context in which the D-Plan was conceived and implemented. If the history of the College during the late 1960s and early 1970s had been any different, it is unlikely the D-Plan would have ever come into existence.
Pressure for Coeducation
In the late 1960s, as Princeton University, Yale University and other comparable institutions of higher learning moved towards coeducation, the College's Board of Trustees remained reluctant to accept women.
As pressure from students and faculty increased, the Board said it would consider admitting women to the College only if coeducation could be achieved without massive construction of residence halls and without reducing the number of male students enrolled.
The Trustees issued these constraints because they did not want to destroy Dartmouth's reputation as a small college, according to History Professor Charles Wood, who also chaired the Committee on Year-Round Operation.
Kemeny established the CYRO, a 12-member committee of administrators, faculty and students, in 1971 to investigate the feasibility of year-round operation.
Wood said in a recent interview with The Dartmouth the Trustees opposed reducing the number of men at the College because they believed a minimum of 3,000 males was necessary to preserve Dartmouth's athletic standing in the Ivy League.
"Dartmouth was not in the same ballpark as Harvard, Yale or Princeton as a research university. We got associated with them purely by the accident of athletic scheduling," he said. "A terrible fear existed that if Dartmouth started losing football games, it would be thrown out of the Ivy League and become like a Bates or Bowdoin."
In 1969, the Committee on Educational Planning examined the issue of coeducation and recommended the year-round calendar after considering the Trustee's restraints.
Religion Professor Hans Penner, who chaired the CEP, said recently "the issue of coeducation got hotter and hotter as the decade ended. Yet given the constraints of the Trustees, it looked like we would not get coeducation."
To enable the faculty to examine each possible combination of D-Plan options, math major Paul Velleman '72 devised a computer program, Penner said.
"I shall never forget it," Penner said. "Paul Velleman came in one day with a computer program that we could use to calculate the exact number of D-Plan patterns. The more we worked with the program, the more we began to see some hope for coeducation."
Penner said according to Velleman's arithmetic, the utilization of Summer term would free up 666 beds, enabling Dartmouth to accept women without increasing the size of the College or decreasing the number of men.
Penner said the committee was thrilled with its findings. "We had champagne at the meeting when we decided to present the plan to the president," he said. "We suddenly realized we had something workable."
The CYRO began looking at the CEP's proposal in May 1971 and prepared a 25-page report in October 1971 recommending year-round operation.
The CYRO's proposal
The CYRO's core recommendations are the basis for today's D-Plan: a year-round academic calendar consisting of four 10-week terms, one required Summer term in residence at the College, adoption of a 33-course requirement for graduation and the reduction of the terms required for graduation from 12 to 11. The required Summer term meant students could take a different term off-campus.
The committee concluded in its report, "Year-round operation will enhance the educational opportunities that the College can offer its students and will permit the introduction of coeducation no later than September 1972."
The CYRO also recommended expanding the College's off-campus programs, a move Kemeny strongly supported.
Under the CYRO's proposal, the number of freshmen enrolled at the College would increase from about 800 to 1,000. With the construction of just one 200-person residence hall, Dartmouth could expand its enrollment by 25 percent. By academic year 1975-1976, the CYRO projected enrollment reaching a new ceiling of 4,000 students, of whom 3,000 would be men.
A preliminary assessment estimated the cost of year-round operation to be somewhere between $2.5 million and $6.5 million, the Valley News reported in Oct. 1971. Wood said if Dartmouth had expanded its facilities to accommodate 4,000 students with a normal academic calendar, the expansion would have cost $25 million.
"On the face of it, part of the interest in year-round operation was that it saved a lot of money," he said. "We were moving to a bed capacity bigger than we had capacity for."
But Wood said the complexity inherent in administering the plan entailed significant bureaucratic costs. The administration costs meant there were "absolutely no savings" between implementing the D-plan and the capital costs of physical expansion, he said.
"I took the figures to the treasurer of the College and he absolutely agreed," Wood said. "But the Trustees preferred to take increasing administrative costs as opposed to capital costs of building."
Reaction to the Initial Proposal
Most students and faculty favored coeducation, and once they realized year-round operation was the only way the College would admit women, they backed the innovative academic calendar.
"Most faculty were overwhelmingly for moving towards coeducation," Penner said. "We never would have gotten year-round operation without coeducation because we never would have gotten students to come during the summer."
Students demonstrated support for the proposals for year-round operation and coeducation by holding a vigil at the Top of the Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts and sending letters to the members of the faculty asking them to support CYRO's recommendations.
According to Wood, some students did oppose year-round operation. He said one student leading the opposition against CYRO's recommendations flew a plane over Memorial Field with a sign that said, "Eleazar Says No!" referring to the founder of the College, the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock.
Approval and Initial Reaction
On Oct. 25, 1971, the faculty overwhelmingly passed the CYRO proposal and recommended to the Board of Trustees that the College institute year-round operation and coeducation beginning in September 1972. One month later, the Board of Trustees approved the proposal.
Since the D-Plan was first implemented, the most serious sustained criticism has come from the faculty, according to History Professor Jere Daniell '51. Although the D-Plan gave the faculty a high degree of flexibility to arrange their teaching schedules, faculty members needed several years to discover the benefits of the plan, Daniell said.
Wood said, "It was rocky until about 1975 or 1976, but once the new and old faculty learned the ropes, faculty opposition began going down."
After the Class of 1976 -- the first class to operate under the D-Plan for four years -- completed their first year, Coordinator of the Dartmouth Plan Harland Hoisington issued a report to the faculty praising the success of the D-Plan.
"Thanks to the cooperation of many people, and particularly to the many faculty departments which are adapting so readily to year-round operation, the 'numbers game' will work in 1973-1974 and gives every promise of continuing to work when we reach steady state in 1976-1977," the report said. "In short, things look even better than expected."
Revisions and adaptations
The D-Plan entailed a fundamental trade-off between flexibility and stability. The increased number of options available to student and faculty came with a sacrifice in the cohesiveness of academic and social life.
The original D-Plan had more than 600 scheduling options, according to Penner. "We had students bouncing in and out of here like billiard balls," he said.
The D-Plan made it difficult for students to pursue specific subjects in depth, Daniell said. In order to preserve the flexibility of the system, professors were often forced to teach courses in one term that should have been taught sequentially over two terms.
The D-Plan also made it difficult for students to maintain friendships and relationships with professors because people's D-Plans often did not coincide, Daniell said. "From a student point of view, the D-Plan was a wonderful way to meet people and a lousy way to make friends," he said.
In 1978, Kemeny decided to re-evaluate the year-round calendar. He formed the Committee on Curriculum and Year-Round Operation and appointed Wright, who was then a history professor, as chair of the committee.
The CCYRO initially considered dropping the system of year-round operation, but faculty and students overwhelmingly opposed returning to the traditional calendar, Penner said.
Wright's committee first recommended shifting to three terms of 14 weeks each while keeping the year-round operation.
The faculty and administrators in the humanities and social sciences divisions favored this plan because the shift would provide them with more time to read and grade papers, Daniell said.
Although Kemeny acknowledged the need to refine the D-Plan in a letter addressed to the faculty in 1980, he wrote that he strongly opposed the trimester system.
"Frankly, I cannot support the trimester proposal even if a significant majority of the faculty endorses it," Kemeny wrote.
Later that year, the faculty voted 111-81 to defeat the proposal to adopt the trimester system.
After the proposal for a trimester system failed, the CCYRO decided to reduce the chaotic nature of the D-Plan. In 1982, the CCYRO's second model called for year-round operation based on four 10-week terms with several new constraints designed to limit the number of scheduling options.
In this plan, the CCYRO recommended all students be in residence during their freshman year, senior year and sophomore summer. The proposal also increased the number of credits required for graduation from 33 to 35 and raised the number of terms required for graduation from 11 to 12.
In May 1983, the faculty approved the proposal to modify the D-Plan by a vote of 118-17.
"By and large, students accepted the revisions. I don't recall a lot of student complaint," Wright said recently. "This is probably because the change did not affect anyone that was currently here."
The Trustees approved the proposal at their June meeting that year and it took effect with the Class of 1988. These revisions constitute the only changes made to the D-Plan since its implementation in 1971.
The D-Plan today
Since the Trustees accepted the CCYRO's recommendations more than a decade ago, there has been no serious discussion concerning the D-Plan, Daniell said.
He said he interprets the lack of debate as an implicit signal of satisfaction with the existing calendar for year-round education.
"If there was dissatisfaction, there would have been discussion," Daniell said. "There's no particular faculty opinion and no particular student opinion, which suggests it is working pretty well."
