In 1771, at Dartmouth's first Commencement, the chefs were too stewed on rum to roast the ox provided for the ceremony.
In 1947, drunk students at a class beer party in old Stell Hall broke windows, smashed dishes and stole 73 steaks from the refrigerator.
In 1952, 2,000 students bearing torches and banging cymbals marched on the dean of the College's house chanting, "We want a beer" to protest a new alcohol policy. The dean resigned the next day.
From barrels to kegs, from New England rum to Milwaukee's Best, nothing permeates Dartmouth's history more than alcohol. And for most of the College's 228 years, no one cared much that students were drinking.
It was not until the era of Prohibition that the College took an active stance in regulating alcohol. The substance that caused hangovers in 150 years of students would generate countless headaches for administrators for the next 75 years.
As it does today.
'Two to three pints daily'
History Professor Jere Daniell said Americans "drank like fish until the 1830s." Dartmouth students were hardly an exception, according to the book "The Alcohol Republic" by historian W.J. Rorabaugh.
The "post-Revolutionary generation of students indulged in unprecedented lusty drinking. One spirits-loving collegian informed the president of Dartmouth 'that the least quantity he could put up with ... was from two to three pints daily,'" the book states.
The book continues, "Worse than the amount of imbibing was the atmosphere that surrounded it, for students mixed their daily bouts of intoxication with swearing, gaming, licentiousness and rioting."
According to Rorabaugh, colleges strengthened the rules governing alcohol consumption in the early 1800s, and some schools banned drinking altogether.
But not Dartmouth.
According to Hanover merchant records from 1809, one student ran up a $10.14 bill over four months -- with purchases including four pints of cognac brandy, six pints of Spanish brandy, 11 pints of Best brandy and six pints of wine.
Daniell said the temperance movement of the 1830s and 1840s reduced the country's alcohol consumption by two-thirds, and many taverns went out of business.
Americans above the age of 15 in 1810 drank 7.1 gallons of alcohol per capita annually. By 1850, the number was reduced to 1.8 gallons, much less than the two to three gallons the average American drinks in 1997.
Speakeasies and frat basements
During Prohibition in 1923, the faculty, frustrated by the number of students imbibing, decided that any student caught intoxicated would be expelled. It was reported that fewer students were drunk at Winter Carnival that year.
But, in reality, Prohibition did not curtail the drinking of Dartmouth men. According to a 1923 article in the Boston Evening Globe, students often made the 150-mile trek to Montreal, where they could drink legally.
It was "not the open intoxication in Dartmouth of a few years ago," the article stated. "One sees very little out-and-out drunkenness in spite of the prevalence of breaths."
The article described well-dressed men boarding trains at the White River Junction station, only to return "pale-faced and mussed" on Sunday.
College President Ernest Martin Hopkins wanted drinking to be legal on Dartmouth's campus, and in 1930 he wrote a letter to the National Temperance Council condemning Prohibition. His letter appeared in several national newspapers.
He wrote that he had hoped for the best from Prohibition but ended up seeing "only more liquor drunk" and a "powerful underworld" created.
After prohibition, Dartmouth began to earn its reputation as a hard-drinking school. Isolationism, prohibition and a growing sense of insecurity "built a community internal for security, and they had parties," Daniell said. "That was a wild time."
Dartmouth parties grew wilder as the decade progressed, and by the end of the 1930s, officials thought they were getting out of hand. The College had abolished regulations prohibiting possession or consumption of liquor in dorms in 1935. But Dean of the College Lloyd Neidlinger thought the rule was misunderstood or deliberately ignored.
In 1939, Neidlinger formed student committees in each dorm or fraternity to regulate drinking and determine punishments for offenders. Neidlinger thought students could control the drinking problem.
He was wrong.
The result was total chaos. Intoxicated students broke windows, made holes in doors, threw bottles out of windows and played with firecrackers.
The night before the College's winter break began in 1939, parties were so out-of-control that students attempted to beat up the dorm chairmen and brought beer to a show in Webster Hall.
But the rowdiness came to a halt with the start of World War II. Students went to war overseas, and the few who remained were banned from drinking in dorms.
The era of abstinence ended, however, with new College President John Sloan Dickey's announcement of "a liberalization of the College's rules following the era of wartime regulation." Drinking was once again allowed in dormitories and fraternity houses.
Dickey's policy emphasized "socially responsible conduct" and recognized the Interfraternity and Interdormitory Councils as agents of student self-government. But Dartmouth men seemed incapable of socially responsible conduct.
In October, 1947, during a home football weekend against Brown University, an outbreak of alcohol-related arrests prompted Neidlinger to rethink his drinking policy.
During the "Brown Weekend," 10 students were arrested for drunk driving, six were arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct and three freshmen were on the verge of being suspended for various violations. "The conduct of a good many men was disgraceful to the Dartmouth College and to themselves," Neidlinger said.
"I don't know what we're going to do about it, but we're certainly going to have to do something," he said.
Government fails; Protest thrives
Neidlinger again tried to let students regulate themselves.
"The College has come to the end of the rope, as exemplified by the Brown Weekend," he said. The student body must control "the lunatics who are spoiling the show for the other students."
Neidlinger formed a student judiciary committee and charged it with initiating a study of drinking at Dartmouth and other colleges. Two weeks later, the judiciary committee decided to fine "any students found guilty of carrying or consuming drinks in public."
The committee told The Dartmouth that the College's geographical remoteness and lack of recreation would cause some men to "go off of the deep end every now and then," but "this type of man is in the minority and should be reprimanded severely."
The committee found that Dartmouth's drinking rules were among the country's most liberal. It said the solution was not to repress drinking, but to punish students who abused their privileges.
But only a month later, at a class Beer Party, disorderly and destructive conduct once again brought student drinking to the forefront. The party was held in old Stell Hall, and students broke windows, smashed dishes and stole 73 steaks from a refrigerator, although the steaks were later returned.
The College started cracking down on alcohol violations.
In May of 1949, the College suspended a student because "he was intoxicated beyond the point where responsible conduct was possible." The student had fallen out of the rumble seat of a car and was taken to Dick's House, where it was discovered he was drunk.
College officials warned students they would suspend students for intoxication. But Neidlinger wanted more -- he had a new vision for the role of alcohol on the Dartmouth campus.
In 1952, he submitted recommendations to the Board of Trustees regarding the alcohol policies. He wanted to require that fraternities, societies or organizations apply for a "Social Privilege Permit" to buy alcohol and keep it on the premises.
The recommendations also suggested banning drinking between midnight and noon. Houses serving alcohol would be required to provide non-alcoholic drinks to guests and were "responsible for the conduct of all who [drank] there."
Neidlinger proposed to disallow any "drinking game contest, race or similar activity which demands or encourages fast or large consumption of alcoholic refreshments."
The student response to Neidlinger's proposal speaks for itself.
On April 29, 1952, 2,000 rioting students carrying cardboard torches, banging cymbals, lighting firecrackers and shouting "We want a beer," marched on Neidlinger's house around midnight to protest his recommendations to the Trustees.
The next day Neidlinger announced his resignation -- although he said the decision had been made several weeks earlier and was not in response to the events of the night before.
The only one of Neidlinger's proposals accepted was to limit drinking to between noon and 1 a.m., with the exception of extended curfews on big weekends. The next month, the policy was extended to permit drinking on Sundays of big weekends between noon and 2 p.m. Previously there had been no drinking at all on Sundays.
The minimum penalty for alcohol policy infractions was increased from a warning to probation.
Two weeks later the penalty for the open container policy, which prohibited students from drinking outside fraternities, residence halls or restaurants, was increased to a $10 fine.
Animal House and beyond
In the era of the Vietnam War Dartmouth saw the emergence of the "Animal House types" and student activists, as well as a renaissance of binge drinking.
In the 1970s, the College revised its attitude toward alcohol.
The Trustees voted in 1979 to affirm their support of alcohol education programs, to make College functions serve non-alcoholic beverages and to "assert that the abuse of alcohol has no place in any valid Dartmouth tradition, nor has it made any positive contribution to the Dartmouth spirit."
In response, administrators changed the alcohol policy for the 1981-82 school year. The new policy stated: "Dartmouth College neither encourages nor discourages the use of alcoholic beverages, but it does condemn the abuse of alcoholic beverages."
Public intoxication and consumption on the Green, near the Connecticut River and at intercollegiate athletic competitions were disallowed. College funds were prohibited for the purchase of alcohol to be served to students under the then-legal drinking age of 20.
The College's next step to control drinking on campus was to limit the places drinking could occur.
Full-sized kegs and common sources of alcohol were banned from dorm rooms or areas not designated as common social space in the fall of 1987. From Sunday through Thursday, taps in Coed Fraternity Sorority houses were required to be shut off from 1:00 a.m. until noon the next day, although a house could request up to three weekday extensions a term.
Another change to the policy took effect in 1988, including the "Good Samaritan Policy" -- which states that a student or organization that assists an intoxicated student in receiving medical attention or aid will not be subject to disciplinary action for intoxication or having provided that student with alcohol.
Also that year, drinking was explicitly prohibited in the cemetery, on the Bema, on the sidewalks or streets of campus and in or around academic or administrative buildings.
One of the larger changes to the policy that year was the prohibition of all kegs of beer in students rooms -- and kegs of any size were restricted to designated social spaces for College-registered events only. At that time, registered parties could occur in dormitory lounges or hallways.
Dean of Residential Life Mary Turco described the dorm parties of the 1980s: "Events were planned and executed in residence hall hallways and stairwells," she said. "Beer would flow down the stairwells."
A new era: the 1990s
Although its patterns of enforcment have changed drastically, Dartmouth's alcohol policy has remained basically unchanged since 1990.
The federal Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act, passed in 1989, required all colleges and universities to ensure local and state laws regarding alcohol were upheld and enforced. Failure to meet this mandate resulted in withdrawal of federal funds.
The College's regulation of alcohol since 1990 has been predominantly in response to this act, according to Senior Associate Dean of the College Dan Nelson.
Nelson said that when the legal drinking age was 18, as it was in New Hampshire until 1979, there was little worry about state laws or underage drinking. The legal drinking age in the state was raised to 20 in 1979 and 21 in 1983.
"Can you imagine how hard this was?" Pelton asked. "The College was put in a position to enforce a law that was broken every day. Three-quarters of the campus is underage."
Turco said the increased involvement of Safety and Security in regulating underage drinking at Greek houses caused CFS organizations to devise "elaborate systems ... with buzzers and lights ... to notify that Safety and Security was coming, so you should drop your beer if you were underage."
The Dartmouth alcohol policy was rewritten in the wake of new federal regulations, Pelton said. The College banned all common sources of alcohol on campus -- meaning no more kegs in Greek houses or residence halls.
A "Bring Your Own Beer" policy then became the campus norm. Students brought their own alcohol to parties at fraternities and sororities. Partly in response to evidence that consumption of hard licquor had increased, Pelton met with students to change the way the policy was enforced.
Pelton was responsible for the legal return of kegs to campus in the fall of 1992. This time kegs were restricted to CFS house common areas, a policy in existence today.
"If we're going to have parties, I'd rather have parties with beer than hard alcohol, so let's control the amount of beer available," Pelton said. Kegs "can be delivered right before the party and taken out the next day -- under no circumstances are there to be kegs in houses otherwise."
With the return of common sources came other developments still in place on campus today -- the student monitoring system and the two-tier party system.
"Students at that time pleaded with me that they had the capacity to make sure these laws were obeyed," Pelton said. "The bargain that we struck was we would bring back kegs" while replacing Safety and Security officers with student monitors who would ensure the state and local laws were obeyed.
But in the four years the monitor system has been in place, not one monitor has ever reported a case of underage drinking to the College, Pelton said.
"I have heard student leaders say they have taken great pride in implementing the student monitoring program to make events safer," Turco said. "But they concede they can't prevent underage drinking, so the role is limited."
At the prompting of a report by the Task Force on Alcohol in the spring of 1995, Pelton reactivated the College Committee on Alcohol and Other Drugs.
He charged the committee, which is comprised of administrators, faculty and students, to look at alcohol use on campus and seek ways to reduce its role in campus social life.
Last term, the CCAOD drafted a set of 11 principles for examination, and these ideas were discussed at a public forum last month.
The current alcohol monitoring system is one issue currently under evaluation.
Other principles were based on compliance with federal, state and local laws concerning alcohol and other drugs, and others showed concern for the current level of alcohol use on campus.
The most recent alcohol-related policy change came just three weeks ago. Following a recommendation by the fire department to reduce Greek houses from being over fire capacity during parties, the College implemented a new rule limiting the number of kegs permissible at a party.
The new formula takes into account the duration of a party, the number of students of legal drinking age, the number of beers per keg and the fire capacity of each house.
