The op-ed by Larry Morse '56, "The Hill Winds Call Fifty Years Later," (June 10) is for me, perhaps, the ghost of alumnus future. I am cranky by nature, and goodness knows how disaffected I will be by the time 2053 rolls around. So, maybe I shouldn't throw stones. Well, okay, just a few.
Morse seems to be the caricature of the old alumnus; the type you hear about from Green Corps volunteers but are surprised to find really exist. He variously takes shots at grade inflation (everyone is doing it), the decline of Winter Carnival (global warming), campus e-culture (Class of 1906 thought your ballpoint pens were blasphemous) and Dean of Institutional Diversity and Equity Tommy Lee Woon (of the Mayflower Woons). He also brings up the perennial and oh-so-important discussion of the Indian Mascot; the Dartmouth conservative's hot-button equivalent of gay marriage, only no one really cares. But Morse reserves his most egregious claims for the women of Dartmouth. He insists the Dartmouth experience has suffered from their admission. The lack of women, he says, made his life easier and improved the quality of his education.
We're not in 1956 any more, Toto. The real world is no longer run exclusively by men. Nor, for that matter, do students graduate from college and enter the male-only management of General Motors or Bethlehem Steel and receive a company car, lifetime job security and a pension plan to die for. Women are our equals in the workplace. To be successful, therefore, it is imperative that men learn to collaborate effectively with women -- and it is tough to do that when they are not around. My two bosses are women. If I told them to do their own filing or invited them to the sock-hop followed by a drive down lover's lane, I would not be employed much longer. In that sense, my Dartmouth education taught me how to not get fired. But more than that, it taught me to respect and appreciate women as my intellectual equals. Dartmouth would be far worse off without women, however "demanding"and "manipulative" they may be.
Besides crankiness, Morse and I share at least one other thing in common. We both love the Dartmouth of our undergraduate years. But I recognize that this love is largely irrational. I am still close enough to remember that I spent a great deal of time at Dartmouth feeling frustrated, sad, angry, lonely, disillusioned, anxious and stressed. It was not "four years in the sun," metaphorically or climatologically. There were great times, yes, and as time passes those memories take precedence over the bad, and the experience assumes a halcyon glow. I try to remind myself of this when I begin pining for those simpler, easier, better days of yore. But perhaps with time I too will view my Dartmouth as unimpeachably superior to anything the future brings.
And he is right, I don't remember "men of Dartmouth." Maybe it's all that granite in my muscles and my brain.
