The whole thing started because I felt sort of guilty. Guilty because I had not done a special tour yet this summer when I knew that as a tour guide I should have volunteered long ago --we are expected to do special tours periodically in addition to our weekly ones.
So when I got a blitz asking if I would conduct a special tour on Friday July 22 for a group from Connecticut, I eagerly signed up.
They were called "The Dreamers", and the name was written all in capitals in the BlitzMail message. I honestly had no idea what that meant. What exactly were they dreaming of?
When I arrived for my tour I soon found out. "The Dreamers" were a group of minority high school students from the inner city who were selected to participate in a program designed to help them stay in school long enough to graduate.
A group of companies had "adopted" these kids and agreed to pay for their college education. They just had to get that far. The Dreamers were brought to Dartmouth so they could see some of the benefits of college life. They came to see our dorms, our gyms and our dining halls.
I would later find out that they were from some of the roughest and poorest neigborhoods in Hartford.
According to a letter from the founder of the program, many "find themselves in a very low percentile as far as reading skills are concerned."
Obviously these weren't exactly the preppy and eager teenagers that I was used to leading around campus.
I ended up with a group of six boys who reluctantly agreed to come with me. I began the tour by telling them how I was from Connecticut too, but soon realized how ridiculous that must have sounded.
I am from a sheltered, cozy university town similar to Hanover. My town is about as far from the inner city as it gets.
Yet, I think that they appreciated my effort, however pathetic. They warmed up a little when I promised to talk about parties.
They teased their teacher who was an alumnus when he asked me if I remembered that 20 years ago, they used to have bike races around the Tuck Mall. They chided me for trying to walk backwards down a flight of stairs.
Soon, I began to pay attention to them. They looked at me incredulously when I told them that the dorms aren't locked here.
They thought I was crazy when I admitted that late at night I often walk across campus alone.
They kept asking me why we didn't see more police cars. They worried that we were going to get in trouble for walking on the grass outside Dartmouth Hall.
They wondered why our group was getting some weird stares.
As I led these six "dreamers" around, I was struck by the fact that they were dreaming about something I had always thought, but rarely dreamt, about. College never seemed like something you had to wish for.
A college education, although not a Dartmouth one, was something I always took for granted. By virtue of my upbringing, I always knew that I'd go to school somewhere.
My dreams were reserved for exotic adventures and people, not studying in the reserve corridor or dining on Food Court pizza. I groan about my English papers that take all night to write.
My friends and I often lament about how much work we have to do and how stressed we are.
As these complaints began to seem more than slightly trivial, I somehow wanted to convince these boys that they could be here too. I wanted to give them a formula to follow to guarantee them a place in a college somewhere like Dartmouth. I wanted to grant them admission myself. Unfortunately, I could not.
The Dartmouth education that I have found so accessible was merely a dream to them. I pondered the fact that they were striving for something I already had, and something that probably didn't take me as much work to achieve as it would take them.
I somehow felt strangely young. I would be floating around on a tube in the Connecticut River the next day while they would be returning home to contend with gang violence on the streets of Hartford.
My safe and tranquil college was a mere respite for them. It was not a way of life.
By the end, I started to think that the guilt about not having done a special tour was a lot easier to deal with than the kind I had begun to experience.
