On Dartmouth’s Christian Heritage

Note: This article first appeared in the print edition of April 21, 2022. It was later excerpted and republished in the print edition of May 11, 2023.

Presented here is the original version of the article, from April 21, 2022.

Reflecting on the Easter season, I thought it was appropriate to spend some time discussing the College’s Christian Heritage. This past Easter I was delighted to partake in many celebrations of the resurrection of the Lord on campus. At Aquinas House, I enjoyed three masses over the holy weekend (Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil) that all were beautiful and uplifting in their own respective ways, and through the Eleazar Wheelock Society, I partook in a quite splendid Easter Egg hunt that took me across various parts of campus. With this being my first Easter on campus (thanks to COVID), I was quite encouraged to find that across the various Christian communities there was a great sense of goodwill and excitement for the holiday. While these celebrations were quite enriching and welcome, they also served as a reminder at just how Dartmouth has pushed to the edges of campus both religion and the College’s legacy of faith.

Where this revisionism is perhaps most apparent is within the popular foundation myth of the College. Every student is told of how Dartmouth College was founded in the 18^th century to educate the natives of the burgeoning colonies, and perhaps a lesser portion of students know that this man was named Eleazar Wheelock. And while perhaps some want to bask in how this mission was either a proto-progressive aim or a version of colonialism itself, rarely do we discuss Wheelock’s reasons to educate natives.

Like all good men of early America, Eleazar Wheelock was deeply religious. During the 1730s, he attended Yale, and there he fell into the First Great Awakening at its height. After graduation, he found success as an itinerant minister in the energetic religious movement; however, like most revivals, the Great Awakening soon ran out of steam and was punished for its excesses, with many colonial governments cracking down on its former advocates. Due to the fervor running out, Wheelock shifted his focus, and began to channel his energy toward the instruction of students at his very own Grammar School. Here he found his prodigy, Samson Occom, who was a Christian-converted Mohegan, and through Occom’s great success as a minister, Wheelock was encouraged to focus his education on natives as he saw the great potential for natives as Christian missionaries. Due to their background and relative affordability, natives were ideal missionaries for Wheelock to help spread the word of Christ to native communities. He first founded Moor’s Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut and later Dartmouth College with this reason – educating natives as Christian missionaries – as the goal in mind.

And while the focus on natives did not last long at the early College, the Christian background certainly did. William Jewett Tucker – arguably Dartmouth’s greatest President – was a Congregational pastor who believed that a sound Christian backing was needed for a modern liberal education. He brought a clear moral and spiritual compass to the College that resulted in its great growth into one of the elite colleges in the country. Legendarily, President Tucker would begin every day by delivering a sermon to the entire student body – one could only imagine if today President Hanlon endeavored to lecture the campus on Christian ethics!

Even this great paper has its founding entangled in the Christian legacy of the College. Many of The Dartmouth Review’s esteemed founders first congregated at Aquinas House, the Catholic student center on campus. In particular, Keeney Jones ’82 would later go on to become a Catholic priest after graduating. One of the motivations behind founding this paper stemmed from a reaction against the Tucker Center (named after President Tucker) and the watered-downed spiritual and religious life it promoted on campus, mistakenly promoting progressive politics as a form of spiritual existence. Today, the Tucker Center is still around, filling students’ email boxes with unread messages of “Spiritual Resources on Racial Justice and Anti-Racism” and constant reminders of “Mindfulness” (whatever that might mean).

Thanks to the efforts of groups like the Tucker Center, the Christian legacy of the College has mostly been shut down on the present campus, and I mean this quite literally. The only explicitly religious building the College has is Rollins Chapel, and it has been closed for the past two years due to fears over “ventilation.” The College has allowed students to take off our masks, but they still have not allowed the house of the Lord to open its doors. In places like Aquinas House, the Wheelock Society, and the Apologia, aware students can still find Christian communities, but outside these spaces, the modern “religious” experience on campus consists of daily emails advertising yoga and “mindfulness” sessions in some back office in Robo.

In all, Dartmouth does have a legacy and tradition of Christianity on campus, and while one should not expect to find much support for this in the offices of Parkhurst or Robinson, I fully expect these communities to continue and thrive. This heritage of Christianity might be forgotten by most on campus, but it is certainly not lost. Like all great traditions on this campus, we must preserve it where we can so that those students who come after us can enjoy what we have been fortunate enough to inherit, and so they can find great solace in the Word of the Lord on Dartmouth’s campus.