Students may be looking forward to cutting loose and enjoying some springtime revelry this weekend, but the Green Key weekends of the past were even more prone to "Animal House"-esque behaviors, according to some College faculty and staff.
In the years before coeducation, Dartmouth men drank and smoked freely but did not often have the opportunity to leave campus or entertain female guests, classics professor Edward Bradley said. When Bradley arrived on campus in 1963, "the [Animal House] stereotype was not all that exaggerated." When Green Key came around, students would set up tents in Hanover and the surrounding area and camp out with their dates. Bradley, who lived in Thetford, Vt., at the beginning of his career at Dartmouth, remembers seeing the multicolored tents spring up near his home.
"There was a time within living memory when Green Key was a great big event," Bradley said. "The corner was just alive with students picking up their dates for the weekend." Still, Bradley recalls a "rather rougher environment" than what exists on campus now.
The atmosphere, he said, felt discernibly different inside and outside the classroom before the College began accepting female students.
One advertisement that ran in The Dartmouth during the 1960s depicts a cartoon of a man sprawled out on his back with a bottle labeled "XXX" on his chest. The text reads "Green Key," and lower, "The Village Store on Allen Street for Glasses, Cups, Plates and Beverages."
"Green Key was the creation, the celebration, of certain aspects of that world where the men here didn't see women that much," Bradley said. "It was a great spring festival."
Green Key is the most recent incarnation of several spring party weekends that have existed in the College's history. The Junior Promenade, which was held along with the fraternities' Spring Houseparties represented the most festive of Spring term's warm-weather weekends until the College canceled the Prom in 1924 due to the students' rowdy behavior. College Proctor and Director of Safety and Security Harry Kinne, believes, along with Bradley, that the weekend has taken on a calmer tone as compared to past decades.
"I think historically that Green Key used to be a much bigger weekend in the past, and in the last 10 years it has sort of evolved into a more moderate type of weekend," Kinne said. "I think that the nature of the entire weekend has changed to be more celebratory of spring."
Bradley attributes the relative taming of the festivities to the arrival of women, saying that the campus culture began to shift by the late 1970s.
"Certainly all of us in the faculty were aware of the remarkable change in the atmosphere," he said.
Kinne agrees that students have lately abandoned the Animal House stereotype, but does not attribute the decrease in hard partying to increased Safety and Security vigilance.
"I think we've been pretty consistent," he said, adding that while there are more staff members on duty during certain big weekends, weekends that have no special designation can sometimes prove more eventful than Green Key.
"I think in general students have been very responsible," Kinne said. "Our big concern is that everybody be safe."
