While students gear up for the flagship weekend of Dartmouth-style carousing, many faculty members at the College remain blissfully unaware of the high-jinks associated with the Green Key holiday.
Some newer professors, with a vague understanding of Green Key frivolity, cancel their Friday classes heading into the weekend. Other professors who were teaching at the College when it resembled the school depicted in the 1978 fraternity flick "Animal House," however, remember a time when the Green Key tradition was richer -- and more riotous.
"When I first came here, it was kind of raucous," French and Italian professor John Rassias said.
Rassias, who started teaching at Dartmouth in 1965, recalled reading a letter in a local paper in which a mother protested that her young child had wandered to the golf course during Green Key and found couples flocking there with mattresses.
Although Green Key antics were more high profile 30 years ago, Rassias said he thought "Animal House," co-written by a Dartmouth alumnus, "grossly exaggerated" the "shenanigans" and drinking culture at the College.
But government professor Mark Sheetz '69, who matriculated the same year Rassias started teaching at the College, thought the movie was true to Dartmouth life.
"'Animal House' was very accurate," Sheetz said. "I was in [Psi Upsilon fraternity] and we were next to [Theta Delta Chi fraternity], and so the poor people who went to church on Sunday morning had to deal with the flotsam and jetsam of the previous night."
Sheetz said that there was a stigma attached to Dartmouth for a number of years because of the type of rowdiness and excess that characterized Green Key when he was a student.
The premiere of "Animal House" only reinforced Dartmouth's uncivilized image, Rassias said.
"The worst part about it was that it drew attention to the alcoholism, obviously, which is not good," Rassias said. "And that did have a negative impact."
Sheetz said that the College has "vastly improved" since he graduated, however.
"Women are a civilizing influence, certainly," Sheetz said, noting that before Dartmouth became co-educational women were "imported" from sister schools.
The "Animal House" connotations have also been slipping away because more social options have appeared on campus outside the fraternity system, Sheetz said.
"There's much more going on now -- it's a much more sophisticated place than when I was here. I'm guessing there's a lot more to do," Sheetz said.
At the same time, Sheetz lamented that loss of colorful, spirit-building traditions including chariot races around the Green and beanie-donning freshmen.
"You had to learn all the fight songs and you knew them for the rest of your life," Sheetz said. "I don't think that's true anymore."
The newer generation of Dartmouth professors is not as in touch with what the Green Key tradition is all about, according to government professor Allan Stam.
"There are certain professors that have been here since the dawn of time, or since women were first admitted, that understand it," said Stam, who joined the government department five years ago.
Despite his unfamiliarity with Green Key, Stam was able to capture what he thought was the focus of the weekend: "an opportunity for drinking and lascivious behavior."
Stam likened Green Key to the big spring weekend at his alma mater, Cornell, where architecture students construct a giant dragon and burn it in a bonfire reminiscent of the one held annually for Dartmouth's Homecoming. The Cornell tradition started just two years after the first Green Key weekend was held at Dartmouth in 1899.
"We had real bands [and] university-sponsored beer trucks," Stam recalled.
Stam said he cancels his Friday classes for Green Key weekend.
"I do it because I'm a nice guy," he said, noting that "half the class won't be there" for a Friday lecture anyway.
Rassias offered a poetic justification for his rescheduling of this Friday's classes.
"The day is in the morn, the year is in the spring, and I say, all Dartmouth students know what that brings, so let it be," Rassias said. "It's hardly going to stop the world from turning if you switch a couple hours here or there."
Faculty members are not under the same pressure as students, and professors understand the fact that students need to be able to "blow off some steam," Sheetz said.
Although professors seem to have a general conception of the goings-on of Green Key weekend, the details of the Dartmouth social scene remain mysterious for most faculty members, who stay on the sidelines.
"There are certain rules that go with having a wife, being over 40 and being a professor," Stam told his U.S. National Security Class on Monday. "Don't hang out with undergraduates at their parties."
"NASCAR, fishing, skeet shooting, book readings, long conversations about life and politics are all okay," Stam said. "Partying is not."
