Dartmouth College

For other uses of the name Dartmouth, see Dartmouth.

Student Life

Student groups

Dartmouth hosts a large number of student groups, covering a wide range of interests. For example, as of 2005

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student musical groups include the Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble, the Dartmouth Glee Club, the Christian acapella group X.Ado, the Dartmouth Chamber Singers, the Dartmouth Aires, the Dartmouth Final Cut the Dartmouth Cords, the Dartmouth Dodecaphonics, the Dartmouth Gospel Choir, the Handel Society of Dartmouth College, the Dartmouth College Marching Band, the Dartmouth Rockapellas, the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra, the Dartmouth Wind Symphony, the Dartmouth Brass Society, and the World Music Percussion Ensemble.

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For more information on individual groups, both in the performing arts and other fields, please see Dartmouth College student groups.

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Winter Carnival

Winter Carnival is, as of 2004, a 94-year-old tradition at Dartmouth College and was particularly famous during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

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The Dartmouth Outing Club, founded in 1909, organized a winter weekend "field day" in 1910. This was an athletic event centered on skiing, a sport which the Outing Club helped to pioneer and publicize on a national scale. In 1911 the event was named Winter Carnival, social events were added, and women were invited to attend. By 1919 the emphasis had shifted to dances organized by fraternities. Special trains made runs to transport women guests to Dartmouth, and National Geographic Magazine referred to it as "the Mardi Gras of the North." The event became famous, much as Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale was to be during the 1950s and 1960s.

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Carnival was the subject of the frothy 1939 motion picture comedy Winter Carnival, starring Ann Sheridan, who plays a former Winter Carnival Queen of the Snows who has made a bad marriage to a European duke and revisits Dartmouth in an attempt to save her younger sister, the current Queen, from repeating her mistake with a European count.

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The movie is remembered mostly for its extracinematic associations; F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dartmouth alumnus Budd Schulberg were hired to write the screenplay. While gathering background in Hanover during Carnival, Fitzgerald became scandalously drunk at fraternities and was forced to leave the project. Although portions of his work were used, he was not given a writer's credit. The events and personalities bear a resemblance to those recounted in Schulberg's novel, The Disenchanted.

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Winter Carnival takes place each year on a weekend in February and include such events as ski competitions at the Dartmouth Skiway; a polar bear swim; a cappella and jazz concerts; a human dogsled race; a drag ball; and a showing of the 1939 movie. Students build a large Carnival-themed snow sculpture on the college Green. The 1987 sculpture held the Guinness record for the "tallest snowman." The sculpture in 2004 reflected the famous character 'The Cat in the Hat,' in honor of the 100th birthday of Dartmouth alumnus and creater of the character, Dr. Seuss.

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Numerous parties are thrown by the campus's fraternities and sororities. In 1999, students cancelled their parties to protest other administration policies.

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Dartmouth Night

Dartmouth Night starts the college's traditional "Homecoming" weekend with an evening of speeches, a parade, and a bonfire. Traditionally the freshman class builds the bonfire and then runs around it a set number of times; the class of 2006 performed 106 circuits, the class of 1999 performed 99.

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President William Jewett Tucker introduced the ceremony of Dartmouth Night in 1895. The evening of speeches celebrated the accomplishments of the college's alumni. Originally the event took place in the Old Chapel in Dartmouth Hall, but over time other events began to become more important and popular and Dartmouth Night moved outdoors.

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The focus of Dartmouth Night is the bonfire. Students had built bonfires during the late nineteenth century to celebrate sports victories, including one in 1888 that recognized a baseball victory over Manchester. An editorial in The Dartmouth criticized that fire, saying:

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:It disturbed the slumbers of a peaceful town, destroyed some property, made the boys feel that they were being men, and in fact did no one any good.

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The students nevertheless continued to build bonfires before and after athletic events, and by the mid-twentieth century, bonfires were firmly associated with Dartmouth Night.

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Richard Hovey's Men of Dartmouth was elected as the best of all the songs of the College at Dartmouth Night in 1896, and today it serves as the school's alma mater. In 1904, the Earl of Dartmouth visited the campus on Dartmouth Night with New Hampshire politician and author Winston Churchill and marched around the Green with the students. Early on, the tradition of reading out telegrams (later e-mail messages) sent that night from alumni clubs around the country began.

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Football first began to be associated with Dartmouth Night during the 1920s. Memorial Field was dedicated on Dartmouth Night in 1923. For decades the raucous pre-football rallies remained separate from the dignified official activities. In 1936, the College first began the tradition of football games during this weekend; ten years later the formal College events and the rally were combined in a single grand event, and for the first time Dartmouth Night was intentionally scheduled on what is called Dartmouth Night Weekend.

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During the 1950s, students adopted a star-hexagon-square structure for the bonfire. Following the tragic bonfire accident at Texas A&M in 1999, the school hired professionals to do some of the building; nevertheless the night still remains a highlight of the school year.

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Athletics

As of 2004 Dartmouth College hosts 34 varsity sports: sixteen for men, sixteen for women, and coeducational sailing and equestrian programs. This place it among the top United States colleges and universities in this regard. In addition, there are twenty-three club sports and twenty-four intramural sports.

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Nicknamed "The Big Green," Dartmouth's varsity athletic teams compete in NCAA Division 1 as well as in the eight-member Ivy League conference, which includes Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. Some teams also participate in the ECAC (Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference). Dartmouth athletics have earned several high honors, excelling in NCAA championships ranging from track and field to basketball, cross country to soccer, as well as skiing, golf, lacrosse and diving.

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Dartmouth hosts many athletic venues. Dartmouth College Alumni Gymnasium, the center of athletic life at Dartmouth, is home of the Dartmouth College Aquatic facilities, basketball courts, squash and racket ball courts, indoor track, fencing lanes as well as a rowing training center. The college also maintains both indoor and outdoor track facilities, hockey arena, football stadium, rowing boat house, and tennis complex.

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As is true of all Ivy League schools, Dartmouth College does not offer athletic scholarships, yet is home to many student athletes. Currently many as three-quarters of Dartmouth undergraduates participate in some form of athletics, and one-quarter of Dartmouth students play a varsity sport at some point during their undergraduate years. The actual numbers of varsity athletes and varsity sports are thus much larger than at schools ten times Dartmouth's size.

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In addition to official varsity sports, Dartmouth students participate in several "club" teams, such as those for rugby.

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For more information on certain individual athletic teams, please see Dartmouth College athletic teams.

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Native Americans at Dartmouth

Native Americans at Dartmouth College

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Dartmouth College: For other uses of the name Dartmouth, see Dartmouth....

Dartmouth Outing Club: The Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC) is the oldest and largest collegiate outing club in the United States. Proposed in 1909 by Dartmouth student Fred Harris to "stimulate interest in out-of-door winter sports", the club soon grew to encompass the College's year-round outdoor recreation and has had a maj...

1909: 1909 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar)....

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