It is pleasant to look at girls if they are pretty. They would help to keep the faculty more alert." And so goes one faculty member's argument for coeducation in 1965. The coeducation debate was raging and students, faculty and the administration were commenting daily in the pages of The Dartmouth and Alumni Magazine.
And so now, 30 years later, a '96 can go digging in the Jones Microtext Center and find comments like these and others which offer a peek into the era. The more I look at these old papers, the more I think about the debates that have taken place on this campus in the past four years.
Just imagine a student (dare I suggest, one of your own kids) reading The Dartmouth in 30 years and laughing uncontrollably at your deep concern about the devastating effect first-year dorms would have on the Dartmouth Community. For that matter, imagine his bewilderment at the overuse of the term "Dartmouth Community." He could do a paper on that in itself: "James O. Freedman and the Evolution of the Dartmouth Community."
As he goes scrolling through your four sacred years at Dartmouth in a matter of hours, he might then come across the next crisis: graduation moved from Baker to Memorial Field. Oh -- to think of it! He'll snicker as he reads about the great debate, the angry letters and the concern that graduation would be ruined -- all due to the change of location. Another good paper could come out of that one: "The Move to Memorial: The Crisis of the '95s."
He'll probably find it even more amusing in light of the fact that you at this point in your life are glad his graduation is occurring at Memorial Field, so your parents (now in their 70's and 80's ) will be able to see and hear better.
Then he might come to the next crisis, in which I have to admit to having a hand. That's right -- it's the Greek Housing Crisis. How dare the administration demand that we fill our beds! "We're autonomous," we cried, "you can't make us fill our beds." He would perhaps be more amused when he gets to The Dartmouth from Jan. 12, 1996 and the College announces its plan to no longer count CFS houses in their available bed count.
The entire Greek debate will probably give him hours of enjoyment. Imagine reading the defenses and counterattacks launched in the pages of The Dartmouth over the past four years. Misogyny vs support networks. Classicism vs tradition. He should be in fits by this point, and on the verge of formulating yet another paper, "The CFS: Lest the Old Traditions Fail."
And so our Dartmouth sons and daughters will no doubt find our college days an endless source of study and entertainment. They will retrace our steps and reread the editorials which we wrote with so much feeling, but now seem outdated and ridiculous. It's amazing how poorly emotional drivel ages.
They will look at the skill of today's D editors, just the way that I see the 1965 editor's decision to include the quote, "If all the women at Dartmouth's winter weekend were laid end-to-end no one would be surprised" in the banner of the Feb. 12 issue. And they'll laugh at the administration's comments with the same amused irony that we experience when we read this analogy for single-sex education from Dudley Orr, a Dartmouth Trustee: "the mere fact that Macy's sells a full line of women's apparel as well as men's doesn't necessarily prove that Brooks Brothers should do the same thing."
Less than 30 years later, Dartmouth has admitted women and Brooks Brothers has started to carry a line of women's clothing. Maybe Macy's stumbled on to something way back then and maybe, just maybe, traditions can slip a little and the world will keep on turning.
