After lobbying in the 1970s, travelling around America as a magician and graduating from college in her 30s, Latin Professor Carla Goodnoh is now in her third year of teaching at Dartmouth.
As a professor here, she sees bridging the gap between faculty and students as one of her key roles. This unique goal leads Goodnoh to various fraternities around campus to meet and socialize with her students.
She said she sees her activity in Greek life as part of her "responsibility" as a professor to get an accurate perspective on student life and beliefs by engaging with students on their "own turf."
She also said she enjoys mingling with younger people and likes the loud music and general atmosphere of Dartmouth's fraternities.
Perhaps as a result, Goodnoh has taken a very pro-student stance in the conflict over the recent Social and Residential Life Initiative.
Goodnoh said she believes one of the most important aspects of a liberal college education is allowing students the freedom to make decisions and mistakes as well as the opportunity to discuss points of disagreement in policies maturely.
"It's not about supporting the Greek system, it's about supporting choice," she told The Dartmouth.
Having had a variety of different experiences during her own undergraduate years, Goodnoh can relate to many students' initial feelings of frustration at "not being listened to," she said.
During her undergraduate years at the University of Oklahoma in the mid to late 1970s, Goodnoh was very active politically. She said there were about 150 or 200 undergraduates who lobbied and marched regularly, and she was part of that group.
She also remembers "rarely" going to class as well as engaging in various kinds of "recreational partying" while at Oklahoma.
"At the end of four years I was still a sophomore," she admitted.
As a result, Goodnoh chose to take time off from school to decide what she wanted to do with her life. She ended up not returning to college for almost a decade.
In the interim she made a living working in restaurants and factories, touring the Southeastern United States as a magician in a travelling show and singing backup in an Elvis revue.
She began at the University of Michigan when she was in her thirties.
Goodnoh went back to Michigan as a freshman because her credits from Oklahoma did not apply at her new school.
Goodnoh speculated that her current involvement in Greek life at Dartmouth may have resulted from these years at Michigan when she befriended her fellow undergraduates, many of whom had just graduated from high school.
While Goodnoh said she enjoys many aspects of Greek life at Dartmouth, she said she was not involved with any aspect of Greek life while attending the University of Oklahoma due to its general conservatism. In fact, she remembers receiving hate mail from different fraternities because of her political activism.
