Editorial: The ’24s and the Dartmouth Experience

The unique character of the College has long been understood to hinge on the maintenance of time-honored traditions. To preserve the character which sets Dartmouth apart, so too must Dartmouth’s traditions be preserved. Some of these traditions date back centuries; others, only decades. But continuing and participating in a sequence of traditions of variegated origin is part and parcel of the unifying Dartmouth Experience.

Most of what we would describe today as Dartmouth’s formative traditions originated with students, who began and maintained these activities of their own accord and often to the chagrin of the Administration and even more so that of the Town of Hanover (think: the Bonfire, begun in 1888). Through the years, however, the Administration has appreciated the importance of these traditions and has made them institutionally recognized—that is, subsumed and run by Administrators, or otherwise officialized via sanctioned student committees.

This Administrative involvement is not an inherently bad thing. It’s perfectly reasonable for the Administration to be involved to address safety concerns, as with constructing the Bonfire and overseeing the Polar Plunge, and to smooth things over with the ever-finicky Hanover town government. Moreover, it would be difficult for students to organize many of the College’s traditions on their own, and I fear some big-ticket traditions, such as Green Key and Winter Carnival, might die out were there not an Administrative helping hand.

However, the presence of this hand in our midst makes traditions subject to regulations and restrictions of varying consequence. One of the more popular and humorous quasi-traditions that somehow endure among students is the dare to “touch the fire” (the Bonfire) on Dartmouth Night. The Administration has resoundingly, and effectively, threatened students to not attempt this mindless feat of yore.

Dartmouth traditions were confronted with series of more unfortunate restrictions of still more debatable sagacity, and not all issued by the Administration alone, in the 2020-2021 academic year. The restrictions of which I speak are, naturally, the intense COVID measures which prevailed, depriving the Class of 2024 of traditions that have historically been essential to immersing students in the Dartmouth Experience from the very start of their time at the College. To date, we ’24s make up the sole Class post-1935 to not have experienced “First-Year Trips” prior to Freshman Fall.

Of course, “Trips” is only one pronounced example of a larger trend of displaced first-year experiences for the Class of 2024, inclusive of rounding the Bonfire. I need not enumerate all of the defining freshman traditions which we failed to experience in our freshman year. Not just the ’24s but students of all Classes, past and present, were well aware of the proverbial list as it was being written. So too was the Administration conscious of the traditions going unobserved—and, though largely just in retrospect, of burdens particular to our Class.

With the onset of the 2021-2022 academic year came new Administrators and a new attitude, appropriately (re)oriented towards student needs and concerns. Traditions historically experienced by the first-year Class were retooled and resurrected—salvaged, perhaps, is the best term—for the sake of the ’24s. In this way, the Administration, along with some spirited and enterprising members of the Class of 2024, saw to it that we experienced, one year late, the preponderance of what we had missed our freshman year. We participated in most of these traditions, such as those on Dartmouth Night, as sophomores in the 2021 Fall term. More recently there was the “Sophomore Trips” program, run by ’24s for ’24s, that was notable for its close emulation of the first-year program.

The Administration and members of my Class have done right and done well to see that these traditions were salvaged. I and so many other ’24s were thrilled to partake and see these traditions observed in our name. However, in college as in life, timing is important. Retrograde participation in traditions which typically prove formative for students who have yet to make friends, take courses, or experience campus to any substantive degree will invariably yield a different and, in my estimation, less wide-reaching effect. Such was the case for the Class of 2024. Checking off the list of traditions, as it were, contributed to our Dartmouth Experience in fewer ways than it would have a year earlier. We had, after all, already formed a conceptualization of the College and of our peers.

The publication of The Review this Summer term thus presents an auspicious opportunity to reflect on the Class of 2024, whose patent singularity in the annals of Dartmouth history renders it an arresting and important object of study. The question at this point is not Have the ’24s experienced the requisite Dartmouth traditions? but rather Has the Class of 2024’s singular Dartmouth Experience been able to place it in harmony with the College’s unique character? I would contend that our present academic term, “Sophomore Summer,” is revelatory to this end.

Sophomore Summer is but another tradition at a College with many traditions, and it can be considered the first which the ’24s are experiencing at its prescribed time. Sophomore Summer is of comparatively recent vintage, having been inaugurated in 1986 as a means of counteracting post-freshman-year Class fragmentation, a byproduct of the quarter system. Introduced in the 1972-1973 academic year as the “Dartmouth Plan” (today it’s known simply as the “D-Plan”), the quarter system was the brainchild of John Kemeny, Dartmouth’s then-president. Kemeny sought to make Dartmouth coeducational, without sacrificing male enrollment numbers or building more housing, merely by capping the number of students enrolled in courses on campus for any given term. And of course, housing problems still plague campus fifty years later. Hence Sophomore Summer has become a Dartmouth tradition in its own right, serving its intended purpose as a vessel for the continued unity of the Class in residence but also as a reminder of the quarter-system foibles that seem to amount to an Administrative stock-in-trade.

Ultimately, Sophomore Summer is not just the time when we, as upperclassmen-to-be, assume positions of leadership in our organizations and effectively have the run of campus. It is also the time when the extent to which our Class exemplifies the College’s distinctive, and cohesive, character comes to the fore. In thus considering the dynamic of the ’24s, I conclude that, while our experiences themselves are hardly synonymous with those of the archetypal Dartmouth Class, the character which we have collectively come to embody and exude, as evidenced this Sophomore Summer, is quintessentially Dartmouth’s. Alumni may rest assured that the Class of 2024 is sufficiently steeped in the ways and norms of Dartmouth—that is, sufficiently enwrapped in the Dartmouth Experience—to carry on the legacy of our forebearers.

It is undeniable that we, the ’24s, have charted our own path to get to this point. We have made it here with resilience and, through the trials and tribulations which we have shared, become a Class as cohesive and evocative of the unique and unified Dartmouth character as customarily realized tradition would have seen us become. I am glad that, this summer, we ’24s can see the fruits of our resilience.