This article is featured in the 2026 Commencement special issue.
Every year on the second Sunday in June, Dartmouth’s graduating class walks across the Green as students for the last time. This year, that ritual falls 50 years after the Class of 1976 — the first class to have spent all four years at a coeducational Dartmouth — crossed it.
In the fall of 1972, 177 women arrived in Hanover as members of the Class of 1976, joining female transfer and exchange students on a campus that still overwhelmingly thought of itself as male. In total, roughly 375 women faced some 3,000 men. They had arrived at an institution that had only just decided it wanted them.
By 1972, every other Ivy League institution had at least some form of coeducation. Dartmouth was the last. The decision was announced only months earlier, after years of debate among trustees, faculty, students and alumni. Responses were divided. Plenty welcomed the decision, but many believed that coeducation would fundamentally alter the institution they loved. Some said so bluntly. One alumnus wrote directly to the chair of the Board of Trustees: “For God’s sake, for Dartmouth’s sake and for everyone’s sake, keep the damned women out.” Another warned that “the Dartmouth we knew will be gone forever.”
And in a sense, that warning was right.
Five decades after the first women graduated from Dartmouth, it is worth considering what disappeared and what replaced it. The standard version of this story is institutional progress: Dartmouth finally admitted women, and the College became more just, more modern and more complete. All of that is true. Yet it is not the whole truth.
The deeper story is not that the College abandoned its identity; it is that the College became a fuller version of itself. That may sound paradoxical. Yet institutions, like people, often discover their character only when they are forced to challenge older versions of themselves, a truth that many college students come to understand firsthand.
There is an interesting tension at the center of Dartmouth’s coeducation story that often gets overlooked. When the trustees voted in 1971 to admit women, much of the public conversation focused on logistics and preservation. How could Dartmouth add women without becoming unrecognizable? Then-College President John Kemeny’s year-round academic calendar, which came to be known as the “D-Plan,” was itself partly an answer to that anxiety: Women could be added without reducing the number of men or radically expanding the physical campus. The institution was trying to absorb change while preserving continuity.
The women who arrived in Hanover understood exactly what they were stepping into. They entered a college where they were outnumbered eight to one, where many alumni openly opposed their presence and where everyday campus life still felt unsettled by the arrival of women.
Early accounts describe women being treated as novelties, outsiders or symbols rather than classmates. Male students hung banners reading “No Coeds” and “Better Dead Than Coed.” An obscene letter was slipped under the door of every room in the all-female Woodward Hall. This hostility was not incidental; it was a defensive reflex from a culture that felt at risk.
What stands out when reading the histories and recollections from that first generation is not triumphalism. The first women at Dartmouth did not think they were merely breaking barriers. They believed they were participating in the reshaping of a community. That distinction matters.
The Dartmouth that existed before coeducation possessed real strengths. Alumni spoke about the intensity of the all-male college: the closeness of friendships, the loyalty to the institution, the rough humor and the sense that Dartmouth existed slightly apart from the modern world. Dartmouth was often viewed as unusually insular.
A 1954 Harvard Crimson profile titled “Dartmouth: A Lonely Crowd” portrayed Hanover as a place defined by intense fraternity culture, institutional loyalty and geographic isolation. The piece captured something real about the old Dartmouth: A college whose identity had become deeply tied to the rhythms and rituals of male life.
The article revealed that insularity had a cost. It portrayed a campus rich in loyalty and tradition, but also one struggling against the limitations of a social world built almost entirely around men. The arrival of women, in a way, saved Dartmouth from becoming a caricature of itself. That is the part of the story that deserves more attention on this anniversary. Coeducation did not simply expand opportunity for women; it altered the cultural texture of the institution for everyone.
For current students, it is difficult to imagine Dartmouth without women. Even though the all-male College existed within the lifetime of most of our parents, it already feels strangely distant, less like an earlier version of the College than a different institution altogether.
There is something fitting about the timing of this anniversary. The first women graduated from Dartmouth in 1976, the year of the American bicentennial. Fifty years later, their reunion arrives as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary. Both moments carry the same question beneath the celebration: What does it mean for an old institution to renew itself without losing its character?
Dartmouth answered that question better than many feared it would. The College did not survive coeducation by abandoning its identity, nor by preserving it untouched. It survived by allowing that identity to grow large enough to embrace a fuller community.
That is why the women who arrived in Hanover in 1972 matter not simply as pioneers, but as institutional stewards. They inherited Dartmouth at a fragile moment and helped shape the version that later generations, including my own, would come to inhabit.
As a member of the Class of 2029, I cross the Green daily as the beneficiary of a battle I never had to fight. When I look at the portraits in our halls or hear the bells of Baker, I don’t see the “gone forever” Dartmouth alumni feared in 1972. I see an institution that is stronger and more confident in itself precisely because it was forced to open its doors.
The women of 1976 did not make Dartmouth less Dartmouth.
They helped make it a fuller version of itself.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
