Imagine seven idealistic students forming an undergraduate society with nine statements of purpose that revolves around one basic theme.
Even though Amarna's founders come from different backgrounds and have different goals for the organization, the one goal they do share is for the new undergraduate society to provide a social space where all students feel welcome.
Most of all, its founders say they hope Amarna will offer a place where men and women can interact comfortably.
That aspiration is echoed by English Lecturer Terry Osborne, Amarna's faculty adviser. Osborne spent close to three years as an adviser to Alpha Chi Alpha fraternity, where he said he saw members' gender relations regressing.
So Osborne said he hopes Amarna will live up to his vision as a place that encourages men and women to have better relationships with each other.
While acting as adviser to Alpha Chi in the summer of 1992, Osborne found a willing listener in the house president that term - Duncan Hodge '94.
Hodge said he liked Osborne's ideas of what a new student organization might focus on. "I was really excited to see a place on campus where men and women could come together," Hodge said.
Hodge talked to Christine Carter '94 about the idea during their drive across the country last summer. Carter was in the same sorority as and is good friends with Rachel Perri '94. Carter is from the same home town as John Peoples '96.
Carter is also in the senior honor society Casque and Gauntlet with Auguste Goldman '94. Goldman has been friends with Andrew Smith '94 for several years.
And Claire Unis '95 said one of her friends told her about the plans for Amarna during the summer, so she sent an electronic mail message to Hodge to tell him she was interested in helping out.
Last term the seven students sat down to hash out the final details of the society.
"As we evolved, as we started to discuss more issues, there were people with some different ideas," Hodge said. "We tried to create a society that would encompass all these things and accept all kinds of attitudes."
And the seven students say it has succeeded so far -each one has something different to say about the society, but everything they say revolves around developing an open social organization.
The five senior founders of Amarna deny that they founded Amarna to be their lasting legacy on campus.
"I don't really think of it as my brain child," Hodge said. "I think I was in the right position to help get it started. It really is much much bigger than any initial idea I had."
Instead, the founders claim they created Amarna to give something back to the College they say has given them so much.
Over the last year and a half, Osborne said he has talked to students about gender issues at the College and what he heard reinforced his conclusion that the current Greek system damages gender relations.
Of Amarna's seven founders, only two have never been members of a Greek house -Peoples and Smith. But Hodge said Amarna is not a reaction to the Greek system in any way.
"I think the people involved in Greek organizations had their own reasons why the Greek system didn't work exactly for them, and they had a chance to resolve some of them or get around it," Hodge said.
As an undergraduate society, Amarna has no rush or pledge period. Any interested student can join by signing a membership card. Inactive members of Greek organizations can also join Amarna.
Osborne said he realized Amarna is a very idealistic concept but said, "I'd much rather have it go down with the vision that it has than compromise that vision and exist as some part of it, some watered-down version of Amarna."
Carter, who is a senior fellow at the College, said she does not think Amarna has sacrificed any of its ideals as it has evolved from theory to practice.
"Before it was a very idealistic, vague and abstract notion. Now it has turned out to be a really fun, great group of people," she said. "It has taken on a new life as it has gone from paper to person."
Carter, who depledged Sigma Delta sorority last term, said she tried to eliminate the bad parts of her Greek experience when working on Amarna. She said she is disturbed when people compare Amarna and the Greek system.
"We certainly have gotten negative reactions, and I worry about that," she said. "But I think it's a great addition to the Dartmouth community."
Carter said Amarna's theme of "promoting equity" will help lead to more positive relations between men and women.
"I don't think Amarna will necessarily have perfect gender interactions," Carter said. "When something offensive does happen, Amarna will be a place where we can deal with it."
Smith, last year's Student Assembly vice president, said because Amarna is coed and has many statements of purpose revolving around equity, it will naturally attract people who are interested in an environment that is more hospitable to equality.
Smith, who called his work on Amarna the most important thing he has done at Dartmouth, said he considers Amarna a social space for students to come together. Although he never rushed, he said Amarna captures many of the positive aspects of the Greek system.
Amarna will try to avoid being locked into a singular motif for its social events, Smith said.
"We'll throw out an array of different social options," he said. "We're not pigeon-holing into one event. The main thing is that everyone is welcomed to all of them."
Unis also said Amarna can transcend what she called "Dartmouth's tendency to pigeonhole."
"It's malleable and up to the members," she said.
Unis is the editor in chief of Spare Rib, a women's issue publication that comes out once a term, and is currently inactive in Sigma Delt. She said the group used their experiences in Greek houses as "a reference point."
Amarna came "out of our love of this new ideal," she said. And the ideal, as Unis sees it, is again, a place where everyone can feel comfortable.
But one of Amarna's founders disagrees.
"In my mind Amarna is not for everybody," Goldman said. "Amarna is one organization with specific goals ... to bring many people together for a healthy, constructive, fun, social environment."
Goldman was an active member of the Assembly, has served on a plethora of College committees and is an inactive member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.
He said he hopes if people disagree with some of the technical details of Amarna but like its guiding principles of equity and gender equality, they will form their own undergraduate societies.
"Amarna is the beginning. I know this sounds corny, but I'd like to think of it as the topsoil to a whole new farm of societies," he said. "Most Dartmouth students can agree with the idea of equality."
For Amarna to be successful, Osborne said it must balance the principles of equity, balance, diversity and tolerance.
"I think it's hard because the campus is generally not in that mode to be equitable and tolerant," he said. "The campus is generally in a dualistic mode which is you're either with us or against us -you either think this way or you think that way."
Of the founders, Perri had the most complaints with the Greek system. Although she was the president of the Panhellenic Council, the governing body of the College's sororities, Perri said she never hid her disdain for the system.
"I don't necessarily like the way people interact with each other and the rest of what goes on in the organization," she said. "I enjoy being in some single-sex organizations, but I also think, socially, that's not the best way to do it."
So Perri said she pictured Amarna as a place where men and women could interact in a more comfortable way but where members can still be individuals. Perri went inactive in Sigma Delt last term, while she was still Panhel President, and depledged at the beginning of this term.
"I wanted the best thing for me, and I wanted something else to be there for students in the future," she said. "A lot of sororities do good things but I think the system is inherently flawed. I think the sororities suffer the most."
Peoples is perhaps the anomaly of Amarna's founders. He never rushed. He is a sophomore. He is not a "student leader." But he is friends with Carter and Hodge, who invited him to work on Amarna when they found out he was not going to rush.
"I envisioned it as a sort of place that would be a little more comfortable for everybody," he said in a telephone interview from Mexico, where he is studying this term. "I wanted people who are really nice and open -people without judgments."
