When Nina Beattie ’89 attended the College, over a decade after women began matriculating, it was not uncommon for a woman walking down a Hanover road to be publicly ‘rated’ by onlookers, she said. Beattie remembers a culture in which sexual harassment was common.
In the years following women’s arrival in Hanover classrooms, many say the dialogue surrounding sexual violence was stilted, allowing harassment and marginalization to slip into college culture without uproar. In recent years, however, the College has moved to bolster its resources to support survivors and bring sexual violence to the forefront of campus discussion.
A “Tremendous” Pressure
Well before the College began to accept women, integration of women into student life was an issue fraught with contention. In 1960, coeducation became a viable topic at the College when then-president John Sloan Dickey announced that Dartmouth would initiate a coeducational summer term.
Theater professor Peter Hackett ’75, a member of the last all-male class at Dartmouth, emphasized that many College communities opposed coeducation.
“In general, there was a significant amount of resistance to women coming on campus, not just from students but also from the faculty and administration,” Hackett said.
The first class of women, which included 178 women and 805 men, arrived on campus in the fall of 1972.
Hackett said the College did not make accommodations for women’s arrival.
“There was a tremendous amount of pressure on the Dartmouth women to adapt and become Dartmouth men,” he said.
Martha Hennessey ’76 said women faced disparagement and verbal abuse during her time at the College. As a student, Hennessey was physically assaulted by an intoxicated fraternity member who accused her of tearing his sweater, she said. She said she heard stories of men urinating on women over big weekends and felt that anti-feminist attitudes were institutionalized.
“People were very nervous about being associated with groups of women who were complaining about anything,” Hennessey said.
Theta Delta Chi fraternity won a singing contest in 1975 for a song called “Our Cohogs,” which included derogatory language toward women. The word “cohogs” is a slur referring to female genitalia. TDX won again in 1976 for a less obscene version of the song.
One line in the song, sung to the tune of “This Old Man,” was, “Our Co-hogs, they play four / They’re all a bunch of dirty whores.”
Hennessey and a group of women planned to throw eggs at fraternity members while they sang, but administrators instructed them that they would face punishment if they did so, she said. She noted that even after she helped draft a petition in opposition to the song, many women were reluctant to sign.
She did not hear people openly reprimand sexist actions for years, she said.
Fraternity songs that featured sexist language were a College tradition into the 1990s. In 1995, a poem was read aloud at Beta Theta Pi fraternity meetings that included derogatory language toward women and Native Americans.
Despite the outwardly hostile climate, Hennessey said that sexual assault was never discussed while she was on campus.
“We got a very clear message that we were supposed to be kind of one of the guys and that if we complained about anything we were sort of ungrateful,” she said.
Marianne Hirsch, who taught at the College between 1975 and 2004, said that in the 1970s, the College did not have a reporting mechanism or trauma resources in place to tackle sexual assault. Women were expected to understand that they would face a difficult climate at the College, she said.
“Women were not encouraged to come forward and report,” Hirsch said.
In November 1979, a female member of the class of 1983 was raped at knife-point by an unknown man, The Dartmouth reported at the time. The perpetrator was never found.
Soon, pockets of campus slowly began introducing resources for women.
The College created the women’s studies department in 1978, now called the women’s and gender studies program. The discipline was the first of its kind in the Ivy League.
English professor Ivy Schweitzer, who started teaching at the College in 1983, said that male students adopted a “wary toleration” of female students. She said there was pressure for women at the College to conform.
“They had to agree to go along with the plan,” she said. “If they didn’t agree to go along with plan, which involved sexism and coercion, they were usually shamed or ostracized or called a lesbian or something like that.”
In 1989, the first year for which sexual assault figures are available, the annual report indicated that students reported nine cases of unwanted sexual contact, three cases of attempted sexual assault and 19 cases of sexual assault.
One third of Dartmouth reported experiencing unwanted sexual contact, and 11.5 percent reported experiencing “completed unwanted sexual intercourse,” the Valley News reported in November 1989. The article said that 5 percent of men at the College had admitted to attempting sexual assault.
Beattie recalled a deeply misogynist culture. She remembers seeing men grab women and pass them up the stands at sporting events.
“There were a lot of things that didn’t quite rise to the level of sexual assault but were common and tolerated,” she said. “All these activities would go on and were somewhat accepted as part of the College.”
During these years, the College’s formal judicial policy for addressing sexual assault began to evolve. From its inception in the 1980s, the Sexual Assault and Sexual Harrassment Committee reviewed College policies regarding sexual assault and offered recommendations, in addition to providing educational services to students and faculty. In 1989, the Sexual Abuse Awareness Program was also created.
Karen Morton ’88 said that gender issues were beginning to rise to the forefront when she attended Dartmouth, but that there was little discussion about developing a formal, College-run system for responding to assault.
“There was more of an emphasis then on personal responsibility on actions and less of an emphasis on what the administration should do to bring justice,” Morton said.
Counseling and human development director Heather Earle, who served as the first SAAP coordinator in 1989, said that her workload made the early years of the program difficult.
Then, she handled both the clinical and outreach functions of the program. Her other responsibilities included creating educational events for freshmen and Greek houses, as well as working with staff and students at Dick’s House.
Committee on Standards hearings looked very different when she first came to the College, Earle said. Then, the alleged victim was not separated from the alleged perpetrator.
The College now takes steps to ensure that alleged victims and alleged perpetrators cannot see each other during disciplinary hearings.
Additionally, Earle was not allowed to explain background information about sexual assault to COS members for fear of bias.
In the early 1990s, growing frustrations over how the College handled sexual assault led to a protest in front of Parkhurst and backlash from then Dean of the College Marvin Lee Pelton, according to a 1992 Valley News article and the letters that Pelton sent to the student body and the Board of Trustees.
Mary Childers, the director of the Women’s Resource Center between 1991 and 1993, wrote in an email that many women complained to her about how the social culture at the College made sexual harassment permissible. She was criticized for her attempts to expand the center’s services, she said.
“When we started trying to initiate assertiveness and self defense training for women, one of my senior male colleagues yelled at me for wanting to teach women to beat up men,” she wrote.
On March 1, 1992, a female Dartmouth student reported being raped by a male student. The student she named as the perpetrator had already been accused of sexual assault by another female student. On April 22, 1992, students protested how the College handled sexual assault outside Parkhurst Hall.
Schweitzer wrote in her email that the protests involved more than just female students, and faculty urged female students not to enter fraternities at night. Policy changes never materialized, Schweitzer wrote.
In a 1992 letter, Pelton spoke out against sexual assault, outlining suggestions on sexual assault prevention and improvements to the adjudication process for alleged victims. The suggestions included allowing alleged victims to take out restraining orders against their alleged perpetrators, installing locks on women’s bathrooms in dorms, increasing programming on preventing sexual assault during freshman orientation week, expelling convicted rapists and the abolition of the fraternity system.
A year later, The Valley News reported that of the 30 cases of sexual assault reported at the College in 1992, five were brought to the Hanover Police. One of the five went to trial, and the jury acquitted the defendant.
Discussion of the relationship between the Greek system and sexual assault peaked again in 1996, when 35 unidentified students distributed flyers to residence halls that named fraternities that the group believed had shown sexist behavior. The group also dumped manure on the lawn of Alpha Chi Alpha and Beta Theta Pi fraternities.
Susy Struble ’93 said that her years at the College were the first years in which administrators began talking about consent and safe sex as part of orientation.
“It was really the beginning of an understanding of the epidemic of sexual assault,” she said.
As a student, Struble cofounded a group called Greeks Against Rape, a forerunner of Movement Against Violence, that brought attention to the role of consent.
During the 1990s, students organized the College’s first Take Back the Night rally that drew attention to the right to move freely, day or night, without sexual harassment or assault. A Take Back the Night demonstration now occurs annually at the College.
Struble said, however, that most conversations about sexual assault were confined to students passionate about the issue.
“Out of the Woodwork”
In 2005, Meredith Raucher ’06 helped start Mentors Against Violence. She said that when organization started, “people just came out of the woodwork with stories.” Her years at Dartmouth, she said, marked the beginning of more student-driven dialogues about sexual assault.
Raucher said the administration did not adequately attempt to handle sexual assault. She recounted an incident in which she believes her female friend was drugged at a fraternity event. Following this incident, both Raucher and her friend were reprimanded by the Deans Office for illegal drinking, Raucher said, but the alleged incident of attempted date rape was not further investigated.
During Raucher’s time at Dartmouth, she said the first Speak Out events were organized, which encouraged survivors to share the story of their assault in a safe setting.
Now, after recent campus protests and the announcement of a new policy, the College is changing its approach to assault.
Last April, a group of students staged a demonstration during the annual Dimensions show to raise awareness about sexual assault, among other issues like racism and homophobia. Following threats to those involved in the protest, the College cancelled classes on April 24.
Raucher said that while she welcomes the new efforts, she believes the policies were put together too hastily and will not improve support for victims.
Earle also said that a major change she has noticed during her time at the College is that more students are now discussing sexual assault.
“I think it’s talked about in a wider spread and range of students,” she said. “Students are talking about it in ways where they see it’s harmful to friends and them.”
Earle said that campus resources and policies have improved since the early 1990s, citing improvements in Dick’s House counseling and centralization of resources.
“In the past, if a student came forward to talk to somebody outside of this office, they would have had to go to their dean to ask for academic accommodations and then to residential life to switch rooms and then maybe even to another department,” she said. “Now it’s centralized, so it really helps with all those things.”
For instance, the College now has a Sexual Assault Response Team that helps students who have been assaulted access resources and work with the College about accommodations, Earle said.
Struble said the College could improve its reporting mechanisms and must place an emphasis on preventing repeat offenses. The College currently receives information on sexual assault from Safety and Security and the Judiciary Committee, but beginning this summer, the College will employ an external investigator to prepare a report to a committee and will encourage expulsion for cases of sexual assault involving penetration.
Earle said that the proposed policy change demonstrates the impact that students have had on the discussion about sexual assault at the College.
“Students were very active in pushing it positively forward,” she said. “I think that students can organize and constructively make things happen.”
