Conversations With Basement Intruders

By Joanna Patterson, The Dartmouth Staff

Published on Friday, July 27, 2007

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Despite their foul smells, permanent layers of grime and questionable sanitation levels, Dartmouth’s basements hold a place in students’ hearts. On trips back home and over the phone to friends, hours are lost trying in vain to justify and explain the appeal of such social spaces, but neither words nor at-home-pong-reproductions can do a basement justice.

While visitors are never a rarity in the basement scene, summer term has seen a basement invasion on a scale markedly different than throughout the rest of the year. With locals and Tuck Summer Bridge Program students all venturing downstairs, what happens when the Dartmouth and non-Dartmouth worlds collide?

One of the most striking aspects of the Dartmouth social scene is the dominance of pong, according to one Duke graduate currently participating in the Tuck Bridge Program.

“We find it very strange that everyone is so defensive and fanatical about pong and refuses to play any other game,” he said. “I got yelled at every time I threw a ping pong ball at anything.”

One Hanover High School senior who asked to remain anonymous as he is planning to apply to Dartmouth for the Class of 2012, said that he has been visiting Dartmouth fraternities since the fall of his sophomore year of high school, but that he prefers Beirut despite extensive exposure to Dartmouth pong.

“Beirut is just more enjoyable than pong,” he said. “I grew up playing Beirut.”

The lack of cleanliness emphasized in Dartmouth pong also stands out, according to Chris Acton-Maher, a Tuck Bridge participant from Harvard.“‘No water cups’ is not a rule that I can sympathize with,” he said. A knowledgeable friend later explained that a water cup is often used in Beirut to rinse the ball between points. Isn’t that what occasionally rinsing with Keystone is for?

Beyond comparisons to Beirut, one Tuck Bridge participant, who asked that neither her name nor her school be mentioned, questioned the appeal of pong at all over other drinking games. “I think it’s a weird game, personally, and I don’t think there’s enough drinking,” she said. “I prefer flip-cup, because you just get ‘faced faster.”

Dartmouth students remain defensive of their pastime, however, and critical of visitors who don’t embrace Dartmouth’s style of play. “It’s just obnoxious when [outsiders] don’t follow your pong rules,” Kristin Fladseth ’09 said. “They just start doing whatever they want and it’s really annoying.”

Others felt the same way. “[Outsiders] try to pretend like they know every single rule at pong, and all their hits are low,” Sarah Newnam ’09 said.

Beyond intentionally not following Dartmouth-style pong rules, other disrespectful behaviors further enrage students. “A Tuck Bridge girl gave me her personal permission to use the back door of Theta Delt,” Madeline Lurio ’09 said. “I was pissed.”

Dartmouth also struck many visitors as defying social norms on a number of other levels. “[Dartmouth students] are all alcoholics — that’s actually my only point,” the Duke student said. “Everyone drinks a lot, but [Dartmouth students] drink just to get drunk.”

The Hanover senior had a similar impression.“The thing that I find is different about Dartmouth parties from high school parties is that Dartmouth kids tend to drink together — alone,” he said. “It isn’t about socially interacting, it’s about getting drunk.”

On the flipside, however, Newnam noted how non-Dartmouth adults exposed to basements drank themselves to excess, despite the fact that their college years were far behind them. “We had a women’s hockey clinic last weekend and half of my team went to KDE,” she said. “Two people didn’t show up the next morning at breakfast, and they were all still bombed at noon. They’re like 40.”

Back on the sanitation front, the Tuck Bridge students also questioned the urination habits exhibited in some Dartmouth fraternities. “Having people boot on other people is not uncommon at all — that happens all the time,” the Duke student said. “But peeing on floors is just nasty, especially when you are playing beer pong off of those floors.”

The large numbers in which outsiders — in particular members of the Tuck Bridge Program — visit Greek houses also aggravates the problem. “Especially with the Tuck kids — often 20 or 25 of them will show up,” Casey Diehl ’09 said. “They don’t show up with a Dartmouth kid, they just hear what’s going on and go from there. It’s worse than a freshman ‘schmob.”

Many other Dartmouth students have noticed these packs of Tuck Bridge students. “Sometimes I’ve been in the basements when it’s been split 50/50 between Tuck students and Dartmouth students,” Meg Montgoris ’09 said. “The non-Dartmouth kids don’t understand the social scene at Dartmouth. We were playing pong and one kid was like ‘This game sucks let’s just play fucking ‘ruit.’ It’s really frustrating.”

Tuck Bridge students aren’t the only ones frequenting basements en mass though — apparently, visiting fraternities is a common activity for high schoolers as well.

“By the time they graduate, I’d say well over half of Hanover High students have visited a fraternity at Dartmouth,” the Hanover senior said. “Especially the girls, they can just go anywhere.”

According to him, one frat row house in particular attracts the “sleazy, slutty, high school girls,” but he refrained from naming this specific frat row establishment.

The key to infiltrating Dartmouth basements, he said, lies in understanding how to act like a Dartmouth undergraduate. “You have to dress in a geeky way that no normal person would dress, and they’ll always let you in,” he said. “If you’re just kinda weird they won’t suspect it at all, but you also have to be kind of smooth about it and not suspicious.”

The perception that Greek life is the central, if not only, social scene at Dartmouth was also a notable one for outsiders. The Duke student explained the difference in Duke’s nightlife. “After sophomore year, you only go to a fraternity or sorority party if it’s a mixer, or you go to pregame,” the Duke student said. “Otherwise you go out to a bar or a club. The night isn’t just the fraternity or sorority party.”

Other visitors criticized Dartmouth for its apparent lack of other social options.

“It’s too frat-oriented, and [greek life] is all that anyone talks about,” Benjamin Kaplan, a University of Texas freshman who visited Dartmouth this summer, said. “It seems like there’s no opportunity, and that it’s very hard to be social.”

Despite hesitations, however, the outsider basement reviews weren’t purely negative.“I feel like I’ve had more contact with friendly people than at any other school I’ve been at,” Acton-Maher said. “There are definitely people who look like huge d-bags who are actually really nice guys.”

Dartmouth students were also not entirely critical, and even welcome to the idea of introducing new people to the Dartmouth social scene. “Non-Dartmouth people can be really fun as long as they’re not obnoxious and realize that they’re in someone else’s house and it is someone’s house,” Sarah Crnkovich ’09 said. “If they want to learn to play pong and are really interested, that’s appreciated.”

When it comes to Dartmouth basements and pong, it’s all a matter of respect. The dress code may be ultra-casual and public urination normalized, but the rules aren’t flexible. Outsiders who try to question the specifics of pong or the generalities of Greek life will likely receive a less-than-loving welcome, but those who are willing to embrace Dartmouth nightlife in all its eccentricity might just find themselves not only invited to play a game of 3 p.m. harbor, but even enjoy themselves doing it.