World War I significantly affected both Dartmouth's campus and students. A 1917 local newspaper article said that Dartmouth quickly enrolled 1,095 men in three battalions and held drills in Alumni Gym. Students built trenches outside Hanover to conduct mock battles and the faculty began teaching military preparation classes. The administration invited Dartmouth men to participate in a 60-day training camp over the summer, after which they were expected to return to campus.
Training ramped up during the fall of 1918 and more and more students left the College in order to enlist. At one point, there were only 850 students on campus, down from a typical 1,500, causing dorms to close and making it difficult for the school to keep up with payments. The Dartmouth administration struggled to accommodate these changes and had to become more meticulous in calculating how many men to accept into the freshman class each year, knowing that many would leave to join the military. The surrounding area got involved in the war effort too, increasing the amount of land available for cultivation of crops to feed the troops.
Despite these conditions, alumni wanted to be reassured that Dartmouth was doing its part to help the war effort, and a pamphlet from the era lists many of Dartmouth's contributions, including the fact that the College was the first to send two complete ambulance units to France.
In total, over 3,000 Dartmouth men served in World War I, and of these, 111 gave their lives to the cause.
World War II also rocked Dartmouth to its core. Early in the conflict, tensions between students and teachers erupted as professors, who had previously told students that an isolationist approach would be best, began calling Dartmouth students cowards for not enlisting. Gradually, interventionism became common and more students joined the war effort. These men wanted to speed up their college work in order to go to war sooner, a trend that was partly responsible for administrative changes to the academic calendar. In 1941, Winter Carnival was canceled, as were all the holidays after spring break, in order to give Dartmouth more time to prepare over the summer. Midway through the war, 2,000 men arrived in Hanover from across the country to train with the Navy in a program called V-12, designed to provide future Navy officers and Marines with bachelor's degrees. Only 229 civilians were enrolled in 1943, and these students were easily housed during the winter. These enrollment rates once again represented a significant decline from a usual 2,400. Dartmouth also offered its residence halls to house British schoolchildren, sent away from their homes for safety concerns, over the summer.
Although then-President Ernest Hopkins hoped to prevent Dartmouth's curriculum from being affected by the war, by 1943 Dartmouth offered 17 war-related courses, including naval geography and the history of Russian revolutions.
Ski Patrol began in the winter of 1942 as part of the war program, and the war also had an effect on local residents, one of whom described Hanover as a ghost town. Over 300 of the 11,091 Dartmouth men who served in World War II died.
During the Vietnam and Gulf wars, the story of Dartmouth at War was one of deep protest and unrest. In May 1969, more than 100 students stormed Parkhurst Hall demanding the eradications of the ROTC program. They occupied the building until 4 a.m., when police were called in. The protestors were jailed for 30 days and the leader expelled.
In November 1969, Dartmouth held a large peace party in which protestors called for both an end to the war and war taxes. Demonstrations occurred all over campus and the state, and students and professors alike were at times arrested for their efforts. In May of the following year, 2,500 members of the Dartmouth community voted to support a week-long strike to support ending the Vietnam War and oppression of African-Americans.
Compared to the reactions of the Vietnam War, anger over the Gulf War occurred on a much lesser scale, even though other small protests ocurred.
While the United States remains involved in multiple armed conflicts today, campus involvement is nominal compared to years past. Whether this is a Dartmouth-specific phenomenon or part of a larger American trend of the average citizen's disconnect with armed conflict is a matter of debate. As we battle over school policies and interpersonal issues, history reminds us that we once threw ourselves into the fray for much more global causes and forces us to consider the change we have undergone as an institution and a nation.
