It's hard to imagine that back in 1769, Eleazar Wheelock envisioned an educational institution with a built-in summer camp for its students. Could he have pictured a place that included not only learning and growth, but also innertubing in July? A trip to the archives of Rauner and a few conversations with administrators revealed the truth behind the inauguration of sophomore summer.
The idea for this celebrated term first bloomed on November 21, 1971, when the Board of Trustees at the College adopted both a plan of year-round operation and simultaneously made the decision to bring coeducation to Dartmouth.
Before the change, Dartmouth had offered courses only in the traditional September-to-June time frame. The shift occurred after a faculty resolution passed earlier that year by a vote of 158 to 44 advocated for such changes.
The Valley News quoted the president of the College at the time, John Kemeny, as calling the year-round plan "momentous," with the potential to "break the lockstep of traditional educational pattern."
As advised by the faculty in 1971, the changes in enrollment involved accepting women to study without significantly decreasing the number of males enrolled.
"The institution felt a need to become coeducational, and to increase enrollment, but not decrease the number of men -- just add women," Marty Redman, dean of Residential Life, said.
With a population of 3,200 men in 1971, enrollment was slated to increase to 4,000, of which 1000 would be women. A major problem, however, was that a significant investment of time and money was needed in order to accommodate a 25-percent increase in enrollment. "In order to [increase enrollment] you need more facilities ---- bed space, dining space, faculty, library space, etc." Redman said.
Thus in order to add students without adding new facilities, Summer term was introduced in 1971, in conjunction with an increased emphasis on off-campus and study-abroad programs. With the exception of a new 200-person residency hall, all of the remaining infrastructure could support the large influx of new students due to these changes in the term calendar. While summer term at Dartmouth is now mandatory, the original stipulations of the year-round plan indicated that students take one summer term at any point during their college career.
In 1982, however, 10 years after the first D-plan was put into place at Dartmouth, a survey of students and faculty at the College revealed a number of reservations about various aspects of the plan. According to the report, both faculty and students said that the exceptional flexibility associated with the D-plan -- which allowed for almost 600 different term schedule options -- interfered with students trying to construct study programs around their majors, disrupted leadership of extracurricular activities and fragmented relationships.
"Because different numbers of students chose their summer terms in different years, planning was difficult and there was also a fair amount of disruption of community," Dan Nelson, acting Dean of the College, said.
In May 1983, shortly after the 1982 survey and report, the faculty voted 118 to 17 to make sophomore summer mandatory. In the subsequent news release, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at the time, Hans Penner, was quoted as saying that such changes would add stability, though sharply decrease the number of scheduling options.
According to Redman, the Summer term seemed like a natural choice in one's college career to stay on campus. "Dartmouth's always had a really big class identity component -- it's with you for life. [Sophomore summer] is a marvelous opportunity to be with your classmates, and to begin focusing on your major in a setting that is less chaotic than a traditional academic year," he said.
It's unclear if sophomore summer has always conjured the same images in the minds of Dartmouth students as it does now -- though a 1976 survey by the College revealed that over 84 percent of both male and female students rated their summer experience as good or very good. At the very least, that seems to be an indication that Summer term was embraced by the student population from the start.
While the administration may not view sophomore summer as an exception to the usual academic rigor of Dartmouth, the smell of barbecuing continues to fill the air and conversations have turned from chemistry to the Copper Mines. Regardless of the original intentions, sophomore summer is a landmark in almost every Dartmouth student's college career. The D-Plan is arguably both one of the most beloved and most criticized aspects of Dartmouth, but sophomore summer is rarely viewed with the same bitter skepticism. No shoes, no snow, and no supervision -- how can you go wrong?
