Town and Gown Calm Down

By Frederick C. Meyer
Posted January 28, 2005

Two hundred years ago, an article about Hanover-Dartmouth relations would have been way more interesting. I apologize, but it's your own damn fault.

Hanover, New Hampshire was granted a charter on July 4, 1761, a date that is still celebrated across America with fireworks and patriotic speeches. Less than nine years later, in mid-1770, Eleazar Wheelock settled on "the southwesterly corner of Hanover, adjoining upon Lebanon" as the site for Dartmouth College, noting its proximity to the Connecticut river", by which the savvy Dartmouth traveler could commute to both Crown-Point on Lake Champlain and Canada. Dartmouth was allotted 3,000 acres of land, and construction began immediately. It was under these auspices that the Hanover-Dartmouth relationship began; and, unfortunately for this article, it has been getting less interesting ever since.

Dartmouth College has quarreled with Hanover since its founding. In recent decades, most problems have come from Dartmouth’s legendarily ebullient student body, but the firebrand in the first major Dartmouth-Hanover conflict was Dartmouth administrator extraordinaire Eleazar Wheelock, the school’s founder and then president. According to the History of Dartmouth College, in January 1777, without asking the permission of the Hanover authorities, Wheelock consented to allow several students to be “inoculated” — it’s unclear what this meant at the time — against a recent outbreak of smallpox in the region. Hanover authorities, for some reason, opposed the students’ inoculation; they preferred simply to quarantine them and wait for them either to die or to recover.

Wheelock began a long and bitter feud with the Hanover authorities, angry at this slight and spurred on by a letter from the Class of 1777 demanding that Hanover either start treating Dartmouth students better or that the whole Class would transfer to another college. As arguments continued, Wheelock grew increasingly nasty; the high point probably came when he accused his opponents of violating the Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Commandments and urged righteous vengeance upon them. After butting heads with Hanover for around a year, Wheelock became determined to dissolve Dartmouth College and move it to another state. The College’s Board of Trustees prevented this calamity by refusing to meet with Wheelock to discuss it. Fortunately, for those students who enjoy living in rural New Hampshire, Wheelock died in 1779 before he could do any more damage, and Dartmouth-Hanover relations gradually improved.

Although the intervening decades make the initial conflict between Dartmouth and Hanover appear somewhat silly and old-world, this was intense stuff. The smallpox controversy was literally a matter of life and death; Dartmouth’s president was determined to dissolve the College; and a whole graduating class was threatening revolt because of its treatment by Hanover. Cartoonish as the whole episode may seem now, if something like it were to happen today, the national media coverage, candlelight vigils, lawsuits, and grief counseling sessions would be enough to make one’s head spin.

Since their hardcore beginnings, Dartmouth and Hanover have steadily dissented less and less. In the 19th century, they still sort of argued — nothing smallpox-caliber - but they could still hold their heads up high. Hanover, New Hampshire: A Bicentennial Book: Essays in Celebration of the Town’s 200th Anniversary, a wonderful book on Hanover through the ages, records that in the summer months in the first 60 years of the College’s history, Hanover farmers were accustomed to turning their cattle loose on the Green. Students responded by locking the cattle in a cellar under Dartmouth Hall, or by driving them three miles up the Connecticut River and across it into Vermont. Fights were a yearly occurrence. Angry Hanoverians shattered college windows; Dartmouth students responded by throwing bricks through storefronts and, on one occasion, whitewashing a farmer’s horse. This was a sticking point until Dartmouth secured the funding for a fence in the mid-19th century.

Livestock shenanigans, horse abuse, and small-scale rioting — still pretty cool — gradually gave way to today’s lame-o non-controversies. The front page story of the July 19, 2000 Dartmouth, for example, tells of students’ anger and dismay at Hanover authorities’ plans to cut down the school’s rope swing (and, if necessary, the tree it was attached to) due to safety concerns. In the same day’s Dartmouth, an Op-ed column entitled “The Trouble with Townies” chides Dartmouth students for their implicitly arrogant attitude toward Hanover residents, ending with this tearjerker of a paragraph:

“Now I have become one of those slowpokes in the street, the impatient coffee-shop customer, the observer of high school students at parties. Every time I see the younger populace of Hanover, however, lounging around the benches of South Main Street, I remember, for a moment, what it is like to be growing up in a small town. I remember the haughty looks from busier-than-thou college students in their North Faces and Ford Explorers as we — those crazy, stupid ‘townies’— sat [sic] the benches of Spring Street. I want to say to my friend, as we cross West Wheelock Street, ‘They do own it.’”

A real stirring call to manners and civility, indeed.

The pettiness of these latter-day disputes has two main causes. First, Hanover today is dependent on Dartmouth. The Hanover City Guide gives Hanover a population of 8,162, not counting on-campus College residents. Meanwhile, the 2003 US Census estimates Hanover’s population, Dartmouth included, at 11,125, giving Dartmouth a population of around 3,000. However, this number is far too small: according to the Dartmouth website, Dartmouth has 581 full-time professors, 4,098 undergraduates (not all of whom are on campus at any one time), and 1,585 graduate students. Taking into account the statistical overlap caused by Dartmouth students and faculty living off campus in Hanover, the people who live here expressly because of Dartmouth are probably nearly as numerous as those who do not. And even among those who do not live here because of Dartmouth, Dartmouth is by far the largest local employer, with an adult workforce of 3,200 people.

Furthermore, many Hanover businesses — Wheelock Books, the Gap, Stinson’s, and Traditionally Trendy come to mind — are not explicitly College-affiliated, but clearly would not exist without Dartmouth students and their needs (to study, wear overpriced khakis, drink Keystone Light, and buy clothing that says “Dartmouth” on it, respectively). This means that Hanover cannot oppose Dartmouth with as much force as it once could, because Dartmouth is central to the success of Hanover as a viable community.

The second borifying variable is Dartmouth students. They’ve changed. Today’s Dartmouth student is intelligent, goal-oriented, accustomed to accepting authority, and possibly female. Yesterday’s, by contrast, was selected by privilege rather than necessarily by talent; was unconcerned about the future thanks to a vast, reliable cushion of friendly wealthy white men; was a rugged frontiersman living in a barely cultivated wilderness, in a society still sticky with afterbirth; and was probably possessed of enough pent-up sexual energy to crush coal into diamonds, science permitting.

Put briefly, today’s Dartmouth students are simply not the type to throw bricks through windows and drive cows across the Connecticut. They’ve invested too much in their education to jeopardize their status at the College. They’re too smart to do egregiously stupid things. They’re used to following the Man’s orders; that’s how they got here. And to top it off, practically half of them are women, ruining the Freudian pressure-cooker that is an all-male college, and obviating the elaborate pranks that all-male college students commit to sublimate their repressed erotic and homoerotic impulses. In unabashed stupidity, today’s Dartmouth students are ill-equipped to compete with their forebears.

What can we do about this state of affairs? I propose a radical solution. What Dartmouth needs now is an Eminem-meets-Howard-Stern-style King of Controversy. This man — and it will be a man — will saunter into the Dirt Cowboy and bitch loudly about Hanover to the locals; will get belligerently drunk and belch beer into the faces of Molly’s diners; will find a horse, whitewash it, paint Satanic symbols on it, turn it loose in the Nugget Theater, and scream to the sky, “I am alive! Dear God, I am alive!”

I would volunteer myself, but, you know, school and all.