Dartblog

This weekend, yesterday through tomorrow, is Dartmouth’s annual Hard Sell Weekend for prospective students, otherwise known as Dimensions of Dartmouth. For these three days, Dartmouth’s undergraduate student population increases by close to 15 percent as about 600 potential members of the Class of 2012 get a carefully manufactured and highly sheltered taste of life at the Big Green.

I am very lucky to have had the chance today to meet and interact with a few of these prospies at the Rockefeller Center’s open house. I came away with the strong impression that come September, Dartmouth will have an intelligent, worldly and attractive Worst Class Ever.

Last evening at 10:00 pm in Alumni Hall was this year’s “Dimensions Show,” the musical spectacle/burlesque/tomfoolery/farce/propaganda piece that forms the centerpiece of Hard Sell Weekend each year. As that genre goes, it was pretty impressive. (But not as impressive as “H-Croo Show” during DOC Trips.)

The prospies were herded en masse into Alumni Hall to sit Indian-style on the floor—and that room is nowhere near big enough for 600 people—to hear what they were told would be a talk by Dean of the College Thomas Crady on the merits of Dartmouth. Dean Crady did indeed take the improvised stage and begin a fake lecture on “Dartmouth’s administration.” (That he used that phrase was ironically funny, because not only is that the most boring topic about Dartmouth he could possibly have chosen, but it is also the one that presents the College in the very worst possible light.)

Seconds later, one of the student actors walked on stage, confiscated Dean Crady’s microphone, and escorted him off. Then the real show began.

(Incidentally, when I attended Dimensions in April 2006, it was then-Dean of Admissions Karl Furstenberg who gave the boring faux-intro. I had thus expected current Dean of Admissions Maria Laskaris to be the one to do it. Dean Crady has been getting around these days, hasn’t he?)

To be precise, I didn’t attend the show itself. It required a ticket, available to prospies only. (As I said, that room is way to small for the prospies alone.) I tried to crash the party, but the actors were checking tickets pretty carefully, and I didn’t have the emotional energy to argue my way in. (And they had had the sense to lock the exterior doors to Alumni Hall.) I’m not cool enough for that. Wait, no—I’m too cool.

I watched the show from Dartmouth Hall room 105, where it was live-streamed to a large screen for the exclusive viewing of too-cool current students just like me.