Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/04/10/the_dartmouth_conundrum.php

The Dartmouth Conundrum

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Editor’s Note: Beginning this issue, the Review presents in serial a memoir of Dartmouth by John Bruce ‘69, an occasional contributor to these pages. Some names have been changed, but the events are true.

I graduated from Dartmouth in 1969, during the spring of the great Parkhurst Hall occupation. I couldn’t wait to get out of the place. By far the best part of the four years I spent there was the semester I was able to take off in order to travel. While Dartmouth was men-only until 1970, the limitations on social life weren’t a problem for me; I had no difficulty getting dates from the various women’s schools in the region, and enterprising students, among whom I counted myself, could also find companionship among lady staff members at the College.

Like many of my fellow students who were real people, as opposed to compulsive valedictorians, my grades had a certain clothesline sag, starting out all right, dipping in my sophomore and junior years, and finishing off fairly high. This appears to be a common story connected with ordinary growth and maturing, and academics weren’t my problem there. At least, I stayed out of trouble.

Nevertheless, I arrived with high expectations, they were never met, and at the back of my mind I always knew I hated the place. So, apparently, did Robert Frost, who matriculated there but ran away soon afterward, and that always reminded me of Samuel Johnson, who had somewhat the same reaction to Oxford. Frost and Johnson, of course, were geniuses and could afford to dump college. I had to stay.

Over my four years in Hanover, I began more or less unconsciously to think of Dartmouth as a kind of puzzle, the solution to which I didn’t have. By the time I left graduate school, I’d roughed out some ideas, but luckily for me, real life began to intervene, and I had about 25 years where I didn’t think much about Dartmouth at all. I’d set the conundrum almost completely aside, which was just as well, because my earlier conclusions were much too premature.

Then I got the November/December 2004 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. In that issue was a full-page sepia-toned portrait of the late David T. McLaughlin, who passed away in August 2004 and had been President of Dartmouth from 1981 to 1987. He was arguably the most hated President in Dartmouth’s history; now the Alumni Mag, as these things are wont to happen, was reconsidering. Maybe he wasn’t quite so bad, after all.

President David McLaughlin pictured in the November/December 2004 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.

The obituary says McLaughlin was “comfortable in tweeds and chinos”, but the portrait with the obituary is nothing like that. It’s full length; McLaughlin is dressed in a dark suit with every jacket button fastened. He’s wearing a foulard tie with a rectangular white display handkerchief in the jacket pocket. His overcoat is folded over his briefcase. The narrative suggested by his pose and the circumstances is plain: the busy but approachable President (his Alumni Mag obituary is entitled “A Go-To Guy”) is caught in a moment of quasi-candor, turning slightly and giving the camera a charming smile as he hurries off to an engagement.

He’s standing on the sidewalk across the street from Parkhurst Hall (where the big cheeses have their offices, and concerning the SDS takeover of which we will hear more), on the edge of the Hanover Green, the camera pointed in such a way that his head obscures the Baker Library spire (Baker being the signature Dartmouth building). Indeed, cursory examination shows there’s been airbrush work to make sure there can be no confusion between the President’s head and the library spire, as well as to banish any impression that the President has a tree growing out of his shoulder. His almost bashful smile and slight turn away from the camera (where in the world is he going on campus, dressed like that?) give an impression of informality, but when you’re buttoned up that way in your suit, the photographer positioned such that you, the President of the College, replace the Baker spire with your head, the actuality is anything but random. We’re back to conundrum here. Mr. Approachable, wearing the full armor of the uptight establishment, visor down.

I searched the photo carefully. It’s an official photo, taken with an expensive camera, trying to look like a snapshot, but there is only one automobile visible at all, possibly two other figures, both in the far distance, hundreds of yards from the subject. I simply have no memory of the Hanover Green in such a state of depopulation. The parking problem has always been such that cars line the streets that border the Green. Clusters of students are always making their way across it. When was this photo taken? Very early on a Sunday morning, or possibly during a holiday break, is my guess; I can’t imagine any other time when so few cars and people would be around. And there, at six-thirty in the morning, is the President of the College, trying to look like he isn’t posing for a portrait. He must have gotten dressed in that outfit specifically for the photo, briefcase included, and he’ll go home afterward, change into something comfortable, and read the Sunday Times.

That, I suddenly realized, was perfectly consistent with everything I’d known of Dartmouth. I looked again at the photo, the line of sad, solemn winter elms framing its top, and it began to take on the look of a Van Gogh painting missing only color, the bare elms forming loops and whorls, and in my imagination I began to see a whole pale gray insipid sky filled with twig-like swirls and circles, rising to the dim disk of the cloud-covered sun, falling to embrace all the half-hidden local steeples and spires and hills and trees on the horizon, all of it inscrutable. What on earth is going on here?

I should get a couple of things out of the way before I go any farther. I have no particular expertise in Dartmouth, its history, its student life, its faculty or administration, its alumni affairs, its iconography, or any other field: I’m speaking here as someone who’s lived in California ever since he left the place, and who, for some years, made a certain, though not strenuous, effort not to have anything to do with it. My observations may be compared in some ways to the psychiatrist who undertakes an analysis of a political figure from a vast distance: Jimmy Carter, we’ve been told, had problems with his mother; George W. Bush is a DSM-IV narcissist. Take this all for what it’s worth. The distance here isn’t just geographic; it’s also one of memory, but I’ll be speaking exclusively of real people and real events. Where appropriate, I’ll supplement my own recollections with pertinent written records. Some names have been changed to protect myself and others.

On the other hand, I speak as someone who’s been drawn back into Dartmouth-interest simply by all the racket of recent years: you can hear it all the way down the block, people: even all the way out here in California. A “visiting professor” is dismissed after “visiting” for eleven years. A Silicon Valley computer magnate is persuaded to mount an insurgent campaign for the Board of Trustees, gaining election by alumni petition over four candidates proposed by the College administration. The Association of Alumni’s annual meeting is packed by shills who work for the College; those who run the meeting refuse to acknowledge that the group’s officers are ineligible for office because they’re beyond their term limits; they refuse even to run the meeting following Robert’s Rules.

When I started this piece, I gave it the working title “The Dartmouth Conundrum”. I actually don’t mean to suggest that there’s a single Dartmouth conundrum, though the working title may imply it. I thought about calling this “The Dartmouth Conundra”, but that might make people think I was talking about the tundra, so I ruled that out; if I called it “The Dartmouth Conundrums”, people might think I was talking about medicine, or that I hadn’t done very well in my Latin after all. The conundrum I’m referring to is more accurately a group of loosely related puzzles. And I don’t mean to imply that I have any one of them, or all of them, all figured out. But I think I may have found a few loose threads that, if I pull on them, might unravel into something interesting. And perhaps, as William Blake said, the fool who persists in his folly here will become wise.

The loud party, or the fight, that’s caused all the racket seems to have begun during David McLaughlin’s administration in the 1980s, so it’s appropriate that I began this with a look at his portrait. But I was so far removed from interest in my alma mater during those years that I didn’t even know at the time that McLaughlin had become President, or that he’d left six years later. The first noise I heard was after that, the lugubrious legal case that arose from the students who were suspended for “vexatious oral exchange” with a professor. That got into The Wall Street Journal, and that’s when the party started to become loud enough for everyone to hear it.

My view of these things, though, isn’t necessarily the traditional left-versus-right, or however these things are characterized in academic terms. This is not going to be about speech codes or political correctness or faculty bias, nor about Greek houses or keg policy. Those disputes are, on the whole, a lot of noise contributing to the obnoxiousness of the loud party, but of little import to those who aren’t already plastered and screaming. Like an irate neighbor, I’m less concerned about what started the fight than I am about getting a good night’s sleep so I can work in the morning, though the noise at this point, I hate to say it, is something in my head, and I’m actually the only one who can stop it.

So maybe, to explain more clearly what I’m talking about here, I need to go back to the beginning, to my freshman year and my sometime friend Larry Burlingame, and his concept of the Green Bummer.