Dartblog

There was an interesting education article in yesterday’s Gray Lady that featured Dartmouth rather centrally (though note: only on the second page of the online edition). This brought me a few smiles:

Take the $1,000 bequest to Dartmouth in 1945, from a soldier who had died in Burma, which his parents suggested be used to keep the Dartmouth president’s fireplace stocked with wood. The president still has a fireplace, but it no longer burns wood; the money is used for general expenses in the office.

A $10,000 gift from Dartmouth’s class of 1879 was directed to pay for trumpeters at graduation. The trumpets still blare in June. But the endowment, now valued at more than a quarter of a million dollars, also pays for the music director.

Edwin Webster Sanborn, a Dartmouth graduate, gave the college money to build Sanborn House for the English department, hoping to foster the kind of close student associations his father had had as a popular English professor. As a condition of the gift, the department was to serve tea daily to its faculty and students at a nominal charge.

Tea is served in Sanborn today, daily at 4 p.m., for 10 cents a cup, open to anyone. Sophia Yuan, the sophomore who hands out the tea as part of work-study, said the practice was charming but drew few takers.

“I think it used to be a big tradition,” Ms. Yuan said. “But as it got more modern, it got washed out.”

Regular Dartblog readers will know that Dartmouth is changing in other, less innocuous ways as well.

JOE adds: And the Times’ photog could hardly have located lovelier Dartmouth ladies to accompany the piece: