The Homecoming We Share

By Daniel F. Linsalata | Friday, October 13, 2006

Much ink has been spilt in these pages about places, events, and traditions that are “uniquely Dartmouth”—and these with all their succeeding implications. Every term, every season, comes with its own offerings to this category. Homecoming, writ large, is not one of these. Nearly every college and university, not to mention high school, in the nation celebrates a homecoming weekend, typically accompanied by a football game. And much like at Dartmouth, alumni from around the country and around the globe (and I say “around the globe” because “’round the girdled earth” is, for all intents and purposes, proprietary) come home to celebrate and take in what they hope to be an epic gridiron battle (An aside: Saturday, 12:30 PM, Memorial Field. Be there. Holy Cross is perennially weak, and the Indians have come into their own on both sides of the ball the last two weeks.)

Dartmouth’s Homecoming separates itself from all others through its evolution and successive manifestations (see page six). Dartmouth’s loyal alumni return to campus with astounding frequency and under the weakest pretenses (“Just to hang out before I go back to work”), a testament to the magnetic spell that the Hanover Plain casts on generations of her sons and daughters. It is not every weekend, however, that they can witness hundreds of freshmen sweeping through campus, an enormous bonfire in the center of the Green, a packed Memorial Stadium, students doing all they can to evade police during the chaos of halftime. Any one of these in itself is worth the trek to Hanover. To wit, Homecoming at Dartmouth is as much a welcoming of freshmen as it is a celebration of returning alumni. At a school in, say, the Big Ten, football alone serves as a universal rallying point, but fails to foster the camaraderie fashioned by Homecoming amongst decades of Dartmouth students. It reminds everyone of what makes Dartmouth—a small college in the New Hampshire wilderness—one of the world’s “Most Enduring Institutions,” as it was deemed last year by Booz Allen Hamilton.

For all students, Homecoming represents one of the few opportunities to metaphorically step out of the Hanover bubble and share in one of the greatest universal institutions in American higher education while simultaneously celebrating everything that is Dartmouth. For freshmen, it also represents their only opportunity to touch the fire, rush the field, and strive in vain to shed the label of being the “worst class ever.”

The Homecoming We Share

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