Bible Study, Opera, and One Packed Bar

by Bradford Stanley

Last Friday I was sitting in my room, completely depressed. It wasn't so much the “atomic wedgie” that I had received in the bathroom minutes before, but rather the whole scene at Dartmouth that was bothering me.

The recent announcement by President James Wright about the potential annihilation of the Greek system was part of it.

This, coupled with a forwarded blitz that originated from Student Assembly President Josh Green in which he crowed about an increase in student spending provided by a hike in the student activities fee, depressed me. Double our lame S.A. spending? Sweet. Maybe the Asgard Annual Brain Bowl will be twice as big next year! To put it mildly, I was sick and tired of the whole scene.

So I decided to go on a road trip to Harvard University, the college that we appear to be modeling ourselves after. Harvard has no recognized single-sex organizations. They do, however, have co-ed on-campus clubs (The Hasty Pudding Club, for example). I was going down to Harvard to check out what the social scene of the future was like.

I really went to go to find out what the social scene was like at Harvard, because I knew that one of my friends at Harvard belongs to an underground fraternity. This is relevant because CFSC president Jamie Paul asserts that “by purchasing and refurbishing houses, the College might force organizations to go underground and cease to run under the auspices of the College. This would be detrimental to both this school and those organizations.” I wanted to see what an underground fraternity was like, because they could be in Dartmouth's future.

I arrived in Cambridge and found my high school friend, Ben Villa. I asked Ben what there was to do and he said that he didn't know.

So we went back to his room to find out what was going on. Ben had a bottle of rum and made us some rum and cokes while we figured out what to do. While he checked his E-mail, I leafed through some old copies of the Harvard Crimson. The Crimson had done a series of articles on the lack of happiness among Harvard students (Dartmouth, by contrast, currently is ranked 6th by The Princeton Review in terms of colleges based on student happiness).

The Crimson writes that “The finals clubs [are] the only real social system available to Harvard students, [but they] involve only a fraction of the student body and are not recognized by the university.”

Ben said that these were essentially fraternities that were unaffiliated with the college. However, he said that we couldn't go there to hang out because their parties were invitation only and that girls got almost all of the invitations anyway. He said that, due to liability reasons, things were the same at Sigma Chi, the underground fraternity where he belonged. But he said that his fraternity was currently dry because they were in the middle of rush.

The Crimson painted an even worse picture of the exclusivity of finals clubs. They wrote that “The A.D. club last month voted to bar non-members from entering the club. Other finals clubs are currently considering similar changes.” But, based on reading the paper, the only other option appeared to be “The Grille,” a local bar which is notoriously lenient with its underage drinking policies.

Ben identified the on-campus options: they were a 7 p.m. bible study and an opera at 8:30. It didn't seem that strange to me that 64-year-old Harvard University President Neil Rudenstine's idea of fun was not consistent with that of the considerably younger student body.

When asked what he would do on a weekend night, he said that he would “find two or three friends, eat some inexpensive food and talk.” This contrasts with A. Matt MacLeod `00, who says that, “I guess, like every other Harvard student, that the Grille is the center of my social scene.” The Grille serves a lot of inexpensive beer but very little food.

Before we were going to head to the Grille, Ben thought that we should stop by a room party. We picked up Ben's girlfriend, Michelle, and headed to a dorm where we had heard tell of a party. The campus was silent and desolate all of the way there. From 50 yards away, I could see where we were going. At least 100 people were pouring out of this tiny dorm room on the first floor. We walked over there and asked what was going on tonight. “Nothing. This is Harvard, after all,” replied Russell Schmidt '01. I asked Joe Turray `01 for a party review and he said that “the parties sucked until they ran out of alcohol. Then they sucked even more.”

I asked Michelle why there were so many people in this little room. She said that there was so little going on on campus that when people hear about a party, they all converge. Ben said that most “parties” last for no more than 30 minutes at most. He said that kids just show up and guzzle down alcohol as fast as they can before it runs out.

The party quickly broke up until Ben, Michelle, and I were standing alone in an empty spot on campus. Everything else around us was dark and silent. Ben said that everyone had gone to the Grille.

We decided to head over to the Grille. My lack of ID was not deemed to be a major problem. I was given the ID card of a guy who, in addition to being 19, was four inches shorter than me and in the throes of male-pattern baldness. It worked, though, and we got in.

We entered the Grille and I understood why it was so popular.

It seemed as though everyone on campus had gathered in this one spot. It was crowded and very hot, but everyone seemed to be having a good time. People were standing around drinking and talking to each other. There was a room with a D.J. and dancing. Somehow, it felt very familiar.

Ben went to go get a pitcher of beer and I talked to Michelle. I asked her what people did here on Friday nights. She said that people either came here or went to Finals Clubs.

“What does everyone else do?” I asked.

“Well, there isn't really anything else that goes on that is very popular. Dry events aren't well populated at all. A lot of people study of weekend nights.”

“Well, Michelle, do you go to finals clubs or anything?”

“I don't. But there are a lot of people, mostly girls, that do. A lot of girls go there after the Grille closes (2:00). They are already drunk by then and they just go, really, to hook up. I used to go to finals clubs, but I don't anymore.”

Then Ben returned with our beer and we stood around drinking. Ben and Michelle must have seen 20 people each that they hadn't seen all week. So they had a lot of fun drinking and reuniting with people. We would periodically go back to the bar to get more pitchers of Miller Lite.

Then the Grille closed and we stumbled back to campus en masse, a group of about 200-300 people, all having a great time. We lost some people who had gone off to finals clubs but the campus had, in a matter of moments, gone from desolate and silent to loud and crowded. It sort of depressed me, because on a Friday night at Dartmouth one can always find people walking around.

It was sad to see that the campus was only full of life after the Grille closed. It made me sad to think that Neil Rudenstine actually believed that people would jump at the chance to join him for some pizza and a discussion.