Standing outside the Choate House, thesimple building with a white clapboard exte- rior, simple cement walkway and forest green shutters, looks little more remarkable than a prototypical suburban home. Students and faculty alike scurry past. They hardly glance at it.
Yet, 30 years ago, the corner of Choate Road and Main Street displayed a strikingly different scene. The house was bustling with professors and administrators alike as they shared lunch with other faculty members — perhaps seeking reprieve from unruly students or simply craving a quality meal.
Functioning much like a restaurant and operating exclusively for faculty and their guests, the Choate House served as the College’s faculty dining club for a decade.
Upon entering the house — now home to the African and African American studies program — one can imagine faculty mingling about in the stately hallway and front rooms, decorated with warm colors and quaint furniture.
It’s not difficult to envision a typical lunch. A classics professor leans against the majestic fireplace, sipping coffee as he debates Rousseau and Voltaire with a philosophy professor. Seated at a mahogany table, a biology professor compares her research with an economics professor over grilled salmon. Sounds of laughter and hums of people deliberating which food to order punctuate the intellectual conversation.
These days such interdepartmental socialization and collaboration seems much harder to come by.
Across campus, faculty offices are generally clustered by department.
In theory, professors could enter their offices and teach a class in the same building, then head home without meeting anyone whose academic interests significantly differ from their own. Several professors whom I interviewed said professional collaboration tends to be intradepartmental — if it happens at all.
The faculty dining club was established in the early 1980s by a committee of faculty responding to concerns about this isolation and lack of collaboration. It became a place where professors could mingle, share thoughts and establish friendships with each other.
Then-College President David McLaughlin took particular interest in the issue.
“He set out to try to do some things to help the faculty,” College President Emeritus James Wright, who was on the committee at the time, explained.
Government professor emeritus Roger Masters, who played a significant role on the committee, said the group used dining club programs like those at Harvard University, Yale University and the University of Chicago for a model.
McLaughlin converted the Choate House to the faculty dining facility. Within the house was a sitting room where faculty could read newspapers and sip coffee, a room with a bar and a dining room — the primary social space — with long tables. Upstairs were two smaller dining rooms where individual departments could host dinners.
In forming an establishment that would encourage interdepartmental socialization and collaboration, McLaughlin and other administrators drew inspiration from a faculty luncheon program at the College that had ended 10 years earlier.
The program had been managed by the Hanover Inn with lunches held at Alumni Hall. For a nominal fee, College faculty and officers could gather at Alumni Hall to have lunch periodically throughout the term, Wright said. Although the program was successful, he said it ended in 1970.
Throughout the next decade, Wright said some faculty members socialized the Hanover Inn’s bar, which was open in the late afternoon for cocktail hour.
For some faculty, though, evening conversations over drinks weren’t possible, as they lived considerable distances from campus, Wright said. When the Inn was remodeled in the 1970s, it closed the bar.
Aiming to fill this void, combining and enhancing the best aspects of the luncheon program and bar, McLaughlin and the committee introduced the idea of a faculty dining club, a physical space that would serve as a social arena for faculty.
Membership was not automatic for faculty — like the luncheon program, a fee was required.
“I think it was about $50 for an annual fee, which wasn’t trivial back in the early 1980s but was within the reach of faculty,” Wright said.
Faculty members often went to the House, which was staffed by Hanover residents, for lunch throughout the term.
“It had a very intimate environment,” English professor Cleopatra Mathis, who attended lunch at the faculty club regularly when she began teaching at the College, said. “The food was delicious. It was just a pleasant place to go.”
Masters agreed, saying the club offered a nice environment to interact with other faculty members.
“It was very welcoming, run very well. People were helpful,” he said. “It was a great place to meet people, and the faculty greatly enjoyed it.”
Masters noted that in recent years academia has required professors to specialize — but that, in turn, requires interdisciplinary collaboration as professors seek new insights. As a result, the opportunities for collaboration that the club provided have become even more crucial.
“Interdisciplinary collaboration is so much more important the more specialized we become,” Masters said. “So many things are interdisciplinary. For example, you need to understand geography to understand history.”
Masters has firsthand experience with interdisciplinary collaboration through the faculty club.
While having lunch regularly at the house, he developed close friendships with biology professor emeritus Edward Berger and anthropology professor emeritus Ken Korey. The three decided to teach a course on the anthropological and biological indicators of voting behavior — thereby combining all of their interests.
“[The club] had a positive effect on so many dimensions — of social and personal interactions between faculty, on students in courses, on faculty with their research,” Masters said.
The dining club offered faculty at a small school a place to come together.
“I met people who I never would have met otherwise,” classics professor emeritus Edward Bradley, who frequented the club for lunch once a week, said.
Despite the numerous professors who enjoyed visiting the club, Bradley said faculty members were sometimes discouraged from faculty-related service — including the club — in favor of spending more time on their research or projects.
“Little by little there was increasing pressure on members of faculty to perform less [professional] service, to focus increasingly on their research as a basis for recognition and increase in salary,” he said. “We would actually discourage new members in our department from spending time on committees.”
Wright also noted that the club’s exclusive nature was unappealing for some faculty, including himself.
“The committee decided that they would only invite people as members who had regular faculty appointments,” Wright explained. “That struck me as too narrowly constructed. I liked it better when you could go to meet with a colleague from administration or a young faculty member.”
He said that this flaw may have contributed to the club’s eventual termination.
“Narrowness of membership did not give it the strong base it would have needed at the time,” he explained.
In 1991, then-College President James Freedman closed the club down due to budget concerns, at the recommendation of then-Provost John Strohbehn, Wright said.
He said that there was little faculty backlash after the club’s dissolution.
“Faculty members would rather have that closed down than cuts made in academic programs,” Wright explained.
Bradley expressed doubts that the club could have ever been successful long-term, largely due to faculty’s expectations. With specialized research, faculty had become “too fragmented and vulcanized” for them to enjoy a dining club.
Mathis, however, suggested that closing the club constituted a real loss for campus, noting that she no longer encounters faculty from different corners of campus.
Bradley said that technology has even further isolated faculty.
“Now people have their eyes riveted on computers,” he said. “Not because of ill will, but because of a disinterest in the intercourse of faculty relationships.”
“The sense of faculty community is nonexistent,” he added.
Masters also questioned whether or not Freedman’s reasoning for closing down the club was in fact based in financial concerns.
“President Freedman was building buildings like McDonalds builds hamburgers,” Masters said. “He had no reason.”
Regardless, there appear to be no plans to formally reinstate the faculty dining club. These days, faculty members look to Pine to provide a social space.
In the ambient, dimly lit room, younger faculty members can be seen mingling at the small bar with graduate students, sipping mixed drinks as they converse about their theses. Older faculty members sit in smaller groups at the dining tables, sipping glasses of red wine and discussing everything from Shakespeare’s role in literature to the outcomes of their children’s soccer games.
Kelley Morgan MALS’16 frequents Pine with fellow graduate students, where she told me that she sees at least one professor there on any given night.
“I think because of the higher price and upscale atmosphere, Pine attracts more professors than students,” Morgan said.
With its combination of a bar and a formal seating area, it attracts faculty of all ages. Morgan said the ratio between younger and older faculty members she sees at Pine is pretty evenly split.
Wright confirmed that Pine functions as a similar social space.
“I do think that at Pine, having been in there for early dinners, you do see people gathering for a cocktail or a drink... There are obviously places that are available now for people to get together now,” he said.
But Masters emphasized that meals at Pine are not sufficient.
“We need to encourage ways for faculty to meet. The first step is to recreate the faculty dining club,” Masters said. “It’s more important now than it ever was.”
Bradley expressed a similar sentiment. Pine, he said, does not substitute for a dedicated dining club.
Bradley also noted that the intimacy of sharing a meal with someone fosters an indelible sense of community.
“Families create identity at the dinner table,” he said. “Dining is an essential occasion for creating fellowship between faculty — and students — and a crucial part of forming community.”
Bradley noted that if the College were to revamp the faculty dining club, including students in the program could ensure its longevity. He noted that residential colleges under the “Moving Dartmouth Forward” plan could reignite these relationships if faculty regularly ate meals with students from each house.
In fact, he expressed doubts that the residential colleges could be successful if this were not the case.
“Without a dining facility where members of faculty are regularly included and students eat every day, I don’t think the residential college can be anything more than a name,” he said.
When Bradley worked at Yale University, he was a faculty fellow at Trumbull College — one of the university’s residential colleges — which allowed him to regularly eat meals with peer faculty fellows and students. He described it as “one of the most important features” of his life at Yale, but questioned whether a similar system could be replicated here.
“I think [College] President [Phil] Hanlon’s new idea of residential colleges is noble, but I don’t think it can be recognized in any significant way unless members of faculty associated with it dine on a regular basis,” he said.
He emphasized, however, that even if it’s not executed optimally, having some sort of facility where faculty can dine together is crucial.
Bradley said faculty no longer have sufficient chances for dialogue.
“But they’re vital to the creation of a true academic community.”
