Homecoming is by far the most exciting big weekend at Dartmouth. Unlike the other big weekends, Carnival in the winter and Green Key in the spring, this one actually still has meaning. It's a time for all the alumni to come up and get sloshed.
Make no mistake, this is not some thing where the alumni are here to root for the football team. We all know what's going on there. In the absence of a legitimate football game, look for many alumni to not even make it to the game.
They'll be at every Greek house Friday and Saturday night. They'll be trying to control things, making brothers and sisters do inane things for them, working the door at parties, letting in freshmen, because, hey, this guy seems all right ... but it won't be easy necessarily. One alum made an '01 eat pine needles to get into a party last Homecoming.
I distinctly remember taking female friends of mine to a party and having them get hit on by a 35-year-old trying to pass himself off as a '98. All I can say is beware. It's a crazy weekend.
Also, all the freshmen should, in lieu of running around the bonfire 102 times, run up to the bonfire and hold your hand on the wood for 102 seconds. It's no big deal, really. Emergency personnel will be on hand, so to speak.
On a more serious note, this is the first homecoming in over a decade where alums will be coming home to a new president of the College, to a vastly changed administration, to a quickly changing Dartmouth campus and to a group of students who will make names for themselves entirely in a new millennium, assuming the entire U.S. power grid doesn't collapse on New Year's Day.
This is obviously a new Dartmouth. It must've been weird when alums first came home to find girls in their old dorm rooms, and new sororities established where fraternities once stood. Now we find ourselves on a campus where alums will be returning to hear stories over and over again from every brother in every house about how things are different, how Greek life is on its way out. Much of it is exaggerated, but it must be acknowledged that the crazy days of yore are no longer here, and even these markedly less crazy days of now are getting less and less crazy day by day.
What else is new? A new warehouse is being built behind Baker library to store all the tools the College has built up, and the bomb shelter that was Kiewit is coming down. Not far north of this, another new warehouse, the psychology building, is nearing completion. Not far north of this, the new math buildings will be built, and not far west of this, the Choates are being expanded to accommodate still more students in ugly, remote housing. Not far west of this is the Roth center, the new center for Jewish life, and not far west of this is Aquinas house, which has just undergone massive renovation. The shower towers are history, as is space for students to have fun in with the transformation of Webster Hall. It really irks me that we had Phish play here a few years back in Webster, and now we have to go listen to the Temptations in the damn gym. This isn't high school! Gymnasiums should not be used as social spaces in their spare time.
Dartmouth dropped a few spots in the U.S. News and World Report poll this year, but they don't know anything anyway. So, a lot has changed and is changing. President Wright has already been spotted on campus more times that President Freedman was during his entire term of office. Students appreciate that. The school's alcohol policy has changed dramatically, but it seems to have acquired nearly universal support from the Greek system and the student body in general.
You alums will probably find that a lot of what has changed is unpopular, and that a lot of it is fine with everybody. You will also find that pretty much all the students feel a sense of helplessness to act either way. Such is the nature of the beast. You'll definitely find that everyone is for the most part happy, though. We don't really have much of a clue about what has gone on in the past and in what ways we're different from older Dartmouth classes. I suppose that's what you all come back for, to educate us.
But I personally am somewhat upset that in 20 years I may come back to a Dartmouth University I don't recognize.
