Surrounded by ancient elms, the campus is spacious and beautiful.
The buildings are mostly Georgian.
The Dartmouth student does not live in monastic seclusion, as he once did.
But his is still a simple life relatively free of the female presence or influence, and he must go far, even though he may go fast, for sophisticated pleasures.
He is still heir to the rare gifts of space and silence, if he chooses to be.

He is by no means the country boy he might have been in the last century, down from the hills with bear grease on his hair and a zeal for book learning in his heart.
The men's shops on Hanover's Main Street compare favorably with those in Princeton and New Haven.
And the automobiles that stream out of Hanover each weekend, toward Smith and Wellesley and Mount Holyoke, are no less rakish than those leaving Cambridge or West Philadelphia.
But there has always been an outdoor air to Dartmouth.
The would-be sophisticate and the citybred youth adopt this air without embarrassment.
No one here pokes fun at manly virtues.
And this gives rise to an easy camaraderie probably unequaled elsewhere in the Ivy League.
It even affects the faculty.

Thus, when Dartmouth's Winter Carnival -- widely recognized as the greatest, wildest, roaringest college weekend anywhere, any time -- was broadcast over a national television hookup, Prexy John Sloan Dickey appeared on the screen in rugged winter garb, topped off by a tam-o'-shanter which he confessed had been acquired from a Smith girl.
President Dickey's golden retriever, frolicking in the snow at his feet, added to the picture of masculine informality.

This carefree disdain for "side" cropped up again in the same television broadcast.
Dean Thaddeus Seymour, wearing ski clothes, was crowning a beauteous damsel queen of the Carnival.
She must have looked temptingly pretty to the dean as he put the crown on her head.
So he kissed her.
No Dartmouth man was surprised.

Dartmouth students enjoy other unusual diversions with equal sang-froid.
For example, groups regularly canoe down the Connecticut River.
This is in honor of John Ledyard, class of 1773, who scooped a canoe out of a handy tree and first set the course way back in his own student days.
And these hardy travelers are not unappreciated today.
They are hailed by the nation's press, and Smith girls throng the riverbanks at Northampton and refresh the voyageurs with hot soup and kisses.

Dartmouth's favorite and most characteristic recreation is skiing.
Since the days when their two thousand pairs of skis outnumbered those assembled anywhere else in the United States, the students have stopped regarding the Olympic Ski Team as another name for their own.
Yet Dartmouth still is the dominant member of the Intercollegiate Ski Union, which includes the winter sports colleges of Canada as well as those of this country.

Dartmouth students ski everywhere in winter, starting with their own front door.
They can hire a horse and go ski-joring behind him, or move out to Oak Hill, where there's a lift.
The Dartmouth Skiway, at Holt's Ledge, ten miles north of the campus, has one of the best terrains in the East, ranging from novice to expert.

Forty miles farther north is Mount Moosilauke, Dartmouth's own mountain.
Here, at the Ravine Lodge, President Dickey acts as host every year to about a hundred freshmen who are being introduced by the Dartmouth Outing Club to life on the trails.
The Lodge, built of hand-hewn virgin spruce, can handle fifty people for dining, sleeping, or lounging in its huge living room.
The Outing Club also owns a chain of fourteen cabins and several shelters, extending from the Vermont hills, just across the river from the college, through Hanover to the College Grant -- 27,000 acres of wilderness 140 miles north up in the logging country.
The cabins are equipped with bunks, blankets, and cooking equipment and are ideal bases for hikes and skiing trips.
The club runs regular trips to the cabins, but many of the students prefer to take off in small unofficial groups for a weekend of hunting, fishing, climbing, or skiing.

Under the auspices of the Outing Club, Dartmouth also has the Mountaineering Club, which takes on tough climbs like Mount McKinley, and Bait & Bullet, whose interests are self-evident, and even sports a Woodman's Team, which competes with other New England colleges in wood sawing and chopping, canoe races, and the like.

There is much to be said for a college that, while happily attuned to the sophisticated Ivies, still gives its students a chance to get up early in the morning and drive along back roads where a glimpse of small game, deer, or even bear is not uncommon.
City boys find a lot of learning in the feel of an ax handle or in the sharp tang of a sawmill, come upon suddenly in a backwoods logging camp.
And on the summit of Mount Washington, where thirty-five degrees below zero is commonplace and the wind velocity has registered higher than anywhere else in the world, there is a kind of wisdom to be found that other men often seek in the Himalayas "because it is there".

There is much to be said for such a college -- and Dartmouth men have been accused of saying it too often and too loudly.
Their affection for their college home has even caused President Dickey to comment on this "place loyalty" as something rather specially Hanoverian.

Probably a lawyer once said it best for all time in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Early in the nineteenth century the State of New Hampshire was casting about for a way to found its own state university.
It fixed on Dartmouth College, which was ready-made and just what the proctor ordered.
The legislators decided to "liberate" Dartmouth and entered into a tug-o'-war with the college trustees over the control of classrooms, faculty, and chapel.
For a time there were two factions on the campus fighting for possession of the student body.

The struggle was resolved in 1819 in the Supreme Court in one of the most intriguing cases in our judicial history.
In 1817 the lawyers were generally debating the legal inviolability of private contracts and charters.
A lawyer, hired by the college, was arguing specifically for Dartmouth: Daniel Webster, class of 1801, made her plight the dramatic focus of his whole plea.
In an age of oratory, he was the king of orators, and both he himself and Chief Justice Marshall were bathed in manly tears, as Uncle Dan'l reached his thundering climax:

"It is, sir, as I have said, a small college, and yet there are those who love it."

Dartmouth is today still a small college -- and still a private one, thanks to Webster's eloquence.

This is not out of keeping with its origins, probably the most humble of any in the Ivy group.
Eleazar Wheelock, a Presbyterian minister, founded the school in 1769, naming it after the second earl of Dartmouth, its sponsor and benefactor.
Eleazar, pausing on the Hanover plain, found its great forests and remoteness good and with his own hands built the first College Hall, a log hut dedicated "for the education & instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land in reading, writing & all parts of learning which shall appear necessary and expedient for civilizing & christianizing Children of Pagans as well as in all liberal Arts and Sciences;
and also of English Youth and any others".

It was a hardy undertaking, and Wheelock's was indeed "a voice crying in the wilderness".
A road had to be hacked through trackless forests between Hanover and Portsmouth to permit Governor Wentworth and a company of gentlemen to attend the first Dartmouth commencement in 1771.
The governor and his retinue thoughtfully brought with them a glorious silver punchbowl which is still one of the cherished possessions of the college.

The exuberance on this occasion set a standard for subsequent Dartmouth gatherings.
A student orator "produced tears from a great number of the learned" even before the punch was served.
Then from the branches of a near-by tree an Indian underclassman, disdaining both the platform and the English language, harangued the assemblage in his aboriginal tongue.
Governor Wentworth contributed an ox for a barbecue on the green beneath the three-hundred-foot pines, and a barrel of rum was broached.
The cook got drunk, and President Wheelock proved to be a man of broad talents by carving the ox himself.

Future commencements were more decorous perhaps, but the number of graduates increased from the original four at a relatively slow pace.
By the end of the nineteenth century, in 1893, when the Big Three, Columbia, and Penn were populous centers of learning, Dartmouth graduated only sixty-nine.
The dormitories, including the beloved Dartmouth Hall, could barely house two hundred students in Spartan fashion.

Then in 1893 Dr. William Jewett Tucker became president and the college's great awakening began.
He transformed Dartmouth from a small New Hampshire institution into a national college.
By 1907 the number of undergraduates had risen to 1,107.
And at his last commencement, in that year, Dr. Tucker and Dartmouth were honored by the presence of distinguished academic visitors attesting to the new stature of the college.
The presidents of Cornell, Wisconsin, C.C.N.Y., Bowdoin, Vermont, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, and Harvard and the presidents emeritus of Harvard and Michigan were there.

Dartmouth is numerically still a small college today, with approximately twenty-nine hundred undergraduates.
But it has achieved a cross-section of students from almost all the states, and two-thirds of its undergraduates come from outside New England.
Over 450 different schools are usually represented in each entering class.
Only a dozen or so schools send as many as six students, and there are seldom more than fifteen men in any single delegation.
About two-thirds of the boys now come from public schools.

It is still a college only and not a university;
it is, in fact, the only college in the Ivy group.
However, three distinguished associated graduate schools offer professional curriculums -- the Dartmouth Medical School (third oldest in the country and founded in 1797), the Thayer School of Engineering, and the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration.
All three are purposely kept small, with a current total enrollment of about two hundred.

All three schools coordinate their educational programs with that of the undergraduate college and, like the college proper, place emphasis upon a broad liberal arts course as the proper foundation for specialized study.
Students of the college who are candidates for the A.B. degree and can satisfy the academic requirements of the medical and business schools, may enter either of these associated schools at the beginning of senior year, thus completing the two-year postgraduate course in one year.
The Thayer School offers a year of postgraduate study in somewhat the same way, after a boy wins a B.S. in engineering.

So Dartmouth is moving closer to the others in the Ivy group.
It is still, however, the junior member of the League, if not in years at least in the catching up it has had to do.
It has not been a well-known school for any part of the span the other Ivies have enjoyed.
However much football has been over-emphasized, the public likes to measure its collegiate favorites by the scoreboard, so, while Yale need never give its record a thought again since outscoring its opponents 694 to 0 in the season of 1888, Dartmouth had to wait until its championship team of 1925 for national recognition.

It has come on with a rush in more significant areas.
Today it espouses certain ideas in its curriculum that other institutions might consider somewhat breathtaking.
But Dartmouth preserves its youthful brashness even in its educational attitudes, and, although some of its experiments may still be in the testing stage, they make for lively copy.

President Emeritus Hopkins once proposed to corral an "aristocracy of brains" in Hanover.