Freshmen officially allowed in frats this Homecoming
This year will mark the first Homecoming with no ban on first-year students attending fraternity parties.
This year will mark the first Homecoming with no ban on first-year students attending fraternity parties.
While small numbers of Dartmouth freshmen continue to rush the field during the annual Homecoming game, the practice appears to have waned considerably since its official prohibition in 1986. The tradition originated in the 1950s, when large groups of freshmen ran out onto the field after halftime to form the numbers of their year.
Recent grads flood campus during Homecoming weekend
When looking ahead to the Big Green football team's Homecoming matchup with defending Ivy League champion Harvard on Saturday at Memorial Field, there's good news, and then there's good news. Good news: With wins over Yale, Holy Cross, and Columbia, Dartmouth (3-3, 2-1 Ivy) is riding a three-game winning streak, the team's first since 1997. More good news: At 4-2 (3-0 Ivy), this year's Crimson squad is hardly the unstoppable juggernaut that went undefeated in 2001 and came back from a 21-0 halftime deficit to beat Dartmouth, 31-21, in Cambridge last year. Despite all this good news, however, the defending Ivy League champions are still no pushover, as the Crimson is tied with Pennsylvania for first place in the Ancient Eight after defeating Cornell, Brown and Princeton. Harvard's offense is led by sophomore quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, who has a 143.79 quarterback rating, the second best in the Ivy League.
Homecoming weekend events require increased officer presence to combat rise in violations
Hotels, restaurants fill to capacity while stores offer deals
The bonfire is coming. You can practically smell the smoke in the air. But the actual burning doesn't happen without careful preparation, and the ignition of the flame only occurs after traditional Dartmouth Night events. Since the bonfire this year falls on the day after Halloween, there will be some related festivities as part of Homecoming weekend.
Fines, terms of College disciplinary action await students daring to rush the field or touch the bonfire
Turning the clock back three weeks, Dartmouth football looked a lot different than it does today.
What impresses Steve Erickson, assistant director of physical education and recreation, most about the bonfire is not the 35-foot height of the structure or the fact that it is built in only a few days -- although Erickson supervises that effort -- or even the moment when the fire collapses about 40 minutes after being lit, sending a stream of ash and sparks in to the air, beautifully lit by the flames below.
I have always been fascinated by fires. There's something about their pristine beauty that has always attracted me.
Memories range from bonfire to football games, from busloads of girls to mountain climbing feats
The leaves of the trees have turned golden. A gust of cold wind whispers across the Green. A sense of romance lingers in the air.
Stories of beloved Homecoming traditions lace Dartmouth's history, but these customs aren't as stable as they may seem.
The recently created Ivy League Environmental Coalition is calling on its schools to create "tree-free" campuses by using only paper from 100-percent post-consumer recycled content. The Coalition, formed at the recent Greening of the Ivies Conference, is also mobilizing to pressure institutions to stop buying paper from the Boise Cascade Corporation, which they say is an egregious environmental offender, mostly because of its logging of old-growth forests. "We need to show [the school] that there is demand and that we are a united force speaking together," said Susan DuBois '05, the Dartmouth representative and head of the Coalition.
An infusion of newcomers into top leadership positions within the Student Assembly, coupled with an exodus of upperclassmen, has past and present members sharply divided over whether continuity in leadership or a fresh approach is better for the organization. Of the nine major executives, more than half are sophomores.
After only two months on campus, recently-hired Associate Dean of Pluralism and Leadership Tommy Lee Woon has already found time to take three student-led campus tours and try the stir-fry at Collis. "I want to see campus through student eyes," Woon said.
Not all courses are created equal -- at least not according to Young America's Foundation, a conservative educational organization that recently released a list of "bizarre" and "ridiculous" classes at colleges across the country. Among the courses to avoid, according to YAF, are "Who is Black" at Harvard University, "Cultural History of Rap" at UCLA, "Philosophy and Star Trek" at Georgetown University, "Black Marxism" at Vassar College and six courses offered at Dartmouth. These courses are included in "Comedy and Tragedy," a compendium of classes from 58 schools that YAF denotes as "eccentric, bizarre and 'politically correct.'" Their primary complaint about the courses listed is a "biased portrayal of a subject in which a number of views are not represented, frequently including courses without regard to the conservative viewpoint," said Rick Parsons, editor of "Comedy and Tragedy." Cited courses at Dartmouth include such classes as the environmental studies department's "Environmental Journalism," and the geography course "Gender, Space and the Environment." Classes in comparative literature; Latin American, Latino and Caribbean studies; and women's and gender studies were also represented in YAF's survey. YAF is a "conservative educational organization which promotes conservative ideas on the nation's college campuses," according to Parsons.
Acting on the results of a campus-wide email survey, Student Assembly will contribute money --which it hopes the College will match -- to funding improvements in dormitory public spaces and creating an off-campus social option, possibly in the spot formerly occupied by Patrick Henry's bar on Main Street. The plan is part of an overall strategy -- dubbed the "Social Empowerment Initiative" by the Assembly -- to give students an increased voice in how their money is spent, Student Life Committee Chair Amit Anand '03 said. Because relatively few students supported funding long-term improvements to Greek houses, the Assembly will not donate money for this purpose.
In the wake of the College's recent announcement that 30 administrative jobs could be eliminated, some staff are circulating a proposal that Dartmouth faculty and employees "voluntarily rebate one percent of their gross salary" to the College in order to prevent layoffs. But while praising the concern he said the advocates of the salary reductions are showing for their fellow employees, Dartmouth Vice President for Public Affairs Bill Walker said that the proposal was unrealistic. Betsy Alexander, the administrative assistant of the art history department, sent out a BlitzMail message late last week, outlining the proposal that she developed with Professor Allen Hockley, also of the art history department. "There's enough groundswell already that a lot of people know about this.