Trustee Susan Dentzer '77 never thought she would be a pioneer, but her Dartmouth experience indicates otherwise.
Perhaps this pioneering spirit was what Dentzer -- a member of the second coeducational class at Dartmouth and the first female graduate elected by alumni to serve on the Board of Trustees -- clung to when she and other members of the Board decided in February to initiate proceedings to revolutionize the College's residential and social life.
Into the wild
When Dentzer first stepped onto campus in the fall of 1973 her freshman year, the male to female ratio was 8 to 1, and she, like many other women on campus at the time, felt the glaringly wide gender gap.
Male students who were angry with the College's decision to coeducate Dartmouth in the fall of 1972, often took their frustrations out on women, she said.
Late at night, some of these men, after they had been drinking heavily, would belt "a very loud rendition of Men of Dartmouth outside of the women's dormitories," Dentzer said.
During the spring of Dentzer's freshman year, a "very loud hockey player" walked up to her with two beers, and proceeded to pour them on her head -- "one for being a coed and one for being at Dartmouth."
Dentzer had also tried her hand at student journalism, but found the experience unpleasant.
"I had written for The Dartmouth for one term, but at the time it was a pretty male dominated environment," Dentzer said. The Dartmouth was "more of a locker-room than a journalistic organization."
Enough women had similar experiences, from time to time, to make college life uncomfortable, but the bonds and friendships that Dentzer formed here made it all worth it.
Dentzer moved into New Hampshire Hall during her freshman year, one of the first coed residence halls at Dartmouth. According to Dentzer, the College was rumored to have assigned women to the hall to make it "less rowdy."
After the Class of 1975 graduated at the end of her sophomore year, the atmosphere at Dartmouth changed dramatically, Dentzer said. The students in the classes that followed all applied with the understanding that Dartmouth was going to be a coed school.
"There were students who were deeply resentful of coeducation," Dentzer said. "When those guys were gone, the whole campus climate changed."
From frats to Hawthorne
Being a member of the Greek system wasn't possible for Dentzer during her tenure at the College -- sororities weren't formed until her senior year -- but she had been closely connected to the Greek system throughout her time here.
"I had so many friends in the fraternities. Every guy I dated was in a fraternity. I spent a lot of time in fraternities," Dentzer said. The Greek system "was part of Dartmouth as much as it is now, and I do know that a lot of my friends did value their time."
Dentzer said fraternities were "the basis of social life," much like it is today. But unlike today, the drinking age then was 18, and nearly every student could frequent local bars on weekends, she said.
For Dentzer and many other students at the time, the residence halls provided a basis for social life, with dinners and small parties all occurring within the halls.
In addition, intramural sports created a bond in the dormitories, and games in the afternoon would be followed by get-togethers in the evenings, Dentzer said.
Football games were a backbone for social interaction, which led to groups following the team around every weekend to every game, home and away, Dentzer said. The football team were the Ivy champions all four years.
"I have close friends to this day from New Hampshire Hall, women and men," she said. "It was fantastic."
An English major, Dentzer wrote her senior honors thesis on the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne with a focus on "House of the Seven Gables."
In her thesis, Dentzer argued that the book represents "the elaborate working out, in his own mind, what Hawthorne underwent as he explored art and whether the impulse to create art was at one with humanity or at opposition to humanity."
Life after Dartmouth
Near the end of her senior year, Dentzer weighed two possible career paths -- pursuing a Ph.D. in literature or going to law school
"But I didn't want to do either right away, so I was looking for things to do in the interim. The one thing that came to mind was journalism," Dentzer said.
At the time, she didn't realize that her interim job would become her lifelong career.
Dentzer started working for a small chain of newspapers on Long Island, and then she moved to New York to work for a Wall Street publication. Soon thereafter she received a job covering Wall Street for Newsweek, thanks in part to Dartmouth connection Lawrence Martz '54, who was assistant managing editor at the time.
She was chosen as one of 12 journalists for the Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, a fellowship that gives journalists a free year at Harvard to further journalism interests in any field.
Dentzer concentrated on health policy, particularly on how health policy is made, and also studied at the Kennedy School of Public Policy and the School of Public Health.
The man who would become her husband, a journalist from North Carolina, was also a Nieman fellow. They have two children, William, 5, and Samuel, 2.
From Harvard, Dentzer got an offer to work for U.S. News and World Report, where she worked for 10 years, and most recently working at NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Growing up
Dentzer, who's father worked for the United States government at the Agency for International Development and the Foreign Service, moved with her family to Peru when she was nine years old, her first international experience.
"It was quite a formative experience, living there as a child," Dentzer said. "We lived in Peru, where the contrast between great wealth and extreme poverty was quite pronounced. It was quite an eye opener."
In the suburb of Lima where her family lived, an apartment building was being built nearby, Dentzer said. While the building was going up, the families of the construction workers lived in the incomplete apartment buildings, without any utilities.
Living in Peru taught Dentzer that "the world is a big place and the United States is just a part of it."
In high school, Dentzer's family moved to Larchmont, New York. One of her friends from high school had attended Dartmouth, and encouraged Dentzer to apply early decision to the College.
Just a year earlier, the College had announced it was going to admit women, and Dartmouth had already garnered national media attention for being the last Ivy to become coed.
Upon coming to Dartmouth for the first time, "I had the reaction that it is said President Dwight D. Eisenhower had when he gave the commencement address. It just looked like a college," Dentzer said.
"I thought, 'it's a great place, the students are happy, its beautiful,' and because it was just going coed, it seemed like it was a pioneering feeling," Dentzer said.
Through Trustee eyes
In 1993, Dentzer was elected to join the Board of Trustees, becoming one of the few women members in the 16-member group.
Last year, after the Trustees released their Five Principles to change social and residential life at Dartmouth, College President James Wright asked Dentzer to serve as Co-Chair for the Committee on the Student Life Initiative.
"He thought that we [Dentzer and co-chair Peter Fahey '68] would compliment each other well. We represented different aspects of the institution," she said. "Peter was here before coeducation. I was not only younger, but also unaffiliated ... It would round out the set of experiences brought to the Committee."
Dentzer she thought it was important to have a broad range of options for people who want to connect socially differently from how they want to connect in fraternities, Dentzer said.
"The four years in College are important ones. [Students] have the potential to be exposed to things that [students] may not come across again. You want to give college your best shot." Dentzer said. "We want to make sure that [students] are living up to the best of their abilities."
Although Dentzer had many friends who were members of the Greek system while she was at Dartmouth, she said she also related "very strongly to the concerns of the students who are not part of the system."
Dentzer said students often don't realize that the job of the Trustees is to provide stewardship for the institution, and must think about where the institution wants to be in 25 years.
The Student Life Initiative has made her think intensely about the long-term future of the College.
"The name of the institution is the Trustees of Dartmouth College. That is really it. We are responsible for thinking through these things, and this has reminded us of our responsibilities in all of those areas," Dentzer said.
