To the Editor:
The Dartmouth's coverage of the death of College President Emeritus James O. Freedman ("Freedman's legacy visible today," "Freedman well received among faculty, students later follow," March 28) accurately recognizes and honors his legacy to Dartmouth College. However, I find the theme of Freedman as a "light-bringer" to a barbarian Dartmouth a little bit offensive. Indeed, I must say I bristle at the notion, suggested off-handedly in several of the articles about Freedman, that the Dartmouth of my day was the equivalent of a community college or vocational training school.
I attended Dartmouth in the 1980s. While this was before the male-female ratio was equal, it was also ten years after the beginning of coeduation. Students of my era hardly felt that they were attending an all-male school. In fact, as amazing as it might seem, there were women in our classes then, we interacted with them on daily basis, and we sometimes even dated them. Dartmouth was certainly not like an episode of the O.C., but nor was it an all-male Valhalla either.
Equally, I think it a gross mischaracterization, as one article in The Dartmouth on Freedman put it, to say that the College of my time was "mired in the bottom" of the Ivy League academically. I consider myself an educated person with a love for learning, and I know my classmates from the 1980s were as well. Getting into Dartmouth in my day was not easy. Indeed, even before arriving in Hanover, I had extensive experience in two of the things Freedman famously said that "intellectual loners" ought to be encouraged to pursue: playing the cello as well as translating Catullus. I never felt that my interest in academic pursuits, or anyone else's, for that matter, was ever squelched by the Dartmouth culture. I belonged to a fraternity while also writing for The Dartmouth and completing a senior thesis, at a time when only a small percentage of seniors opted to do so. I'd put my intelligence and academic abilities on the line against any jerk from Harvard any day of the week.
Despite the above, I greatly admire Freedman and his contributions to the College. But what I most respected about him was the fact that he understood that he could accomplish laudable goals for the College without in any way diminishing all that was plainly good and right about the place: something that countless Parkhurst drones from before and after Freedman have never seemed to grasp. He approached Dartmouth with an open mind, and allowed it to cast her spell over him. That is a less heralded, but to my mind more significant reason, to remember and appreciate Freedman. Dartmouth got to him as much as he got to it.
