Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/05/18/dickersons_memos_and_meetings.php
Friday, May 18, 2007
By John Bruce
Editor’s Note: TDR presents the next chapter of “The Dartmouth Conundrum,” a memoir. Some names have been changed, but the events are true.
It was a spring evening after dinner, still light when the Dean arrived. He brought with him a tiny dog, possibly a Yorkshire terrier, that clearly adored him and cavorted around his feet. He smoked profusely; he finished the pack he had, and we gave him some of ours. The cigarettes would kill him in half a dozen years. Dickerson knew both Larry and Bill from some past history (which, again, they’d never shared with me), but I was completely new to him. In fact, that probably threw him off in the talk session that followed. He was expecting more of the same small-potatoes grievances based on grandiose and abstract principles; instead, I’d follow each unpromising gambit from Bill or Larry with “What I think we’re really meaning to say here is...” and offer a more considered approach.
Larry’s idea of the Green Bummer hadn’t, at that early date, been fully formed. But I thought the essence of what he and Bill had been pointing out, at least in the early part of the prior meeting, was valid: Dartmouth was a kind of brand, which people were endorsing and adopting without any real thought. I’m a Johnnie Walker man, a Pabst Blue Ribbon guy. I drive a Lincoln. Dartmouth: the thinking man’s cigarette. But what was the reality that supported the brand claims? Our classes were boring and trivial (in hindsight, crammed with an astonishing amount of rote learning). Our peers were vapid and conventional.
I could see the surprise in Dean Dickerson’s face at discovering a conversational adversary who wasn’t simply sophomoric. On behalf of Larry and Bill, I was able to force the match to a draw—or perhaps the Dean was polite enough to allow it to seem that way. “What do you make of that dog?” Bill asked as we left the lounge. “Think of it—he had to bring that little dog with him to protect him.” It never occurred to either one of them, I think, that they’d had to bring me along to protect themselves. For that matter, it hadn’t even occurred to me.
The next afternoon I found a little envelope from Parkhurst in my mailbox. A typewritten note read as follows:
Dear John,I wanted to say how much I enjoyed the discussion I had with you last evening in Hinman, but I also noticed that we’d never previously had a chance to get together for a chat. I wonder if you would be kind enough to drop by at 10:30 AM on Tuesday. Looking forward to it!
Al Dickerson
Following Dickerson’s death in 1972, Dartmouth published a book of his selected writings, many of which deal with his time as Dean of Freshmen (he spent his whole career at Dartmouth). He was noted for witty and informative letters that he sent periodically to all the freshman parents, and samples of those are included in the book. Various other memos-to-the-file cover how he handled disciplinary matters, the quirks of individual students, and the routine tasks of his work. From those I can begin to piece together what may have been on his mind in talking to me, and why Bill and Larry couldn’t stand him.
The first thing I began to understand when I revisited my relationship with him via Selected Writings was that, even though it was the middle of spring term by the time I met him, that had been for a reason. The reason was that I hadn’t caused him enough trouble to call me in earlier. I hadn’t received any warnings of unsatisfactory grades, and I hadn’t received any final Ds or Es, either. I hadn’t done anything egregious or bizarre. Other students had, and they were the ones on whom he was spending his time.
This appears to be why Bill and Larry had gotten to know him before I had, and they’d both gotten to know him well enough to have pretty inflexible attitudes by then. Why? I simply hadn’t given this question any thought. Wasn’t everyone else just like me, doing OK with their grades, even if not at the top of the class? Apparently not.
One of the memos reproduced in Selected Writings, dating from 1964, or about a year before his first meeting with me, gives his normal approach to an interview with a freshman:
Usually I start off with a relaxed “How are things going?”—to give the interview a routine complexion.Then I usually go course by course to find how they are doing, who are their teachers, how they react to them, and how much time they are spending, per assignment, in studying for each course.
For the obviously highly successful student, I don’t spend much time on study techniques. For the others—the majority—I usually ask how much time they spend studying, per assignment, where they study, how late they study, whether they have learned to use the daytime hour here and there between classes, etc. If they appear unorganized about study, I suggest working out a schedule and refer them to [______]’s course in reading and study techniques....
After surveying courses and study habits, I usually ask about their prospective major and career goals. Unless they are doing very well in the most importantly relevant courses and know clearly what they want to do, I almost always suggest going to the Office of Student Counseling for a reading of the Strong Vocational Interest Inventories....
If a man has a set of high MMPI scores, I tend to prolong the conference to get a fuller reading on the boy....
Then the questions about roommates and dormitory conditions to get a picture of the student’s social relationships....
On one hand, this memo makes it easier for me to visualize the meetings he must have had, months earlier, with Bill and Larry. I have a hard time avoiding the feeling that those meetings had gone according to his normal scheme; they’d likely occurred because they’d both attracted his attention in some way, which means probably not a good way; and those interviews had gone badly.
But the thing that impresses me is how little any of my meetings with Dickerson—I saw him once or twice a year for the rest of my time at Dartmouth—resembled the outline. If he steered our first interview in any particular direction—and based on his memo, steer it he must certainly have done—it was toward my relationship with Bill McMann and Larry Burlingame. He had, I now assume, gotten to know them pretty well in prior months. He didn’t know me at all, and I think he was working rather deftly to piece out what was going on down in Hinman among the three of us.
I had a lot of admiration for Bill McMann, and in fact I still do, in spite of the fact that he’d already managed to steal my Colby Junior College girlfriend (he did me a big favor, of course). He was a couple of years more mature than I was, and while the maturity was partly just the result of being alive longer than I’d been, he’d given me some important messages.
One was that—even if only by using the tricks of a parlor psychic—you could gain insight into what motivated people and what they were really like behind their social facades. He was clever that way, but I think there was something more to his knowledge of character than just cleverness. If there was a way to find that kind of wisdom, I wanted to find it, and that was one of the things I told Dickerson in the meeting. So I spent much of the time telling Dickerson how much I admired Bill, and how far behind him I felt I was. Larry was, at that time, a secondary figure, a disciple of Bill just like me.
Dickerson’s response was twofold. The first thing he did was gently set me up for what was to come: “Bill was what I guess we would call an experiment,” he told me. “Every year we admit a few students that are wild cards...” but then he shook his head sadly and had nothing else to say about Bill. Bill, I now realize, was flunking out, and he’d likely had not one but several discussions with Dickerson that started out about how things were going.
The second thing he did was this: “Let me read you something about yourself,” he said. I didn’t realize, of course, that before anyone walked into his office, he had the guy’s whole record in a folder in front of him. That was his job. You didn’t just come into his office for an idle chat.
“You visited our admissions office two years ago when you were first considering coming here, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You met with Ed Chamberlain, the Dean of Admissions then, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“How do you think you did on that interview?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t feel all that good about it.”
“Let me read you the notes Ed made afterward,” he told me. “‘Fine boy,’ is what he wrote. ‘Very well spoken. Very mature. Very intelligent.’ I know Ed. I trained him for that job. Ed doesn’t write notes like that very often.”
I didn’t have anything to say. Dickerson just let the words echo, let me think about them.
“You sell yourself short,” he said. That was the end of that meeting.