Cheryl and Rosa As a member of the executive committee of the Alumni Association Cheryl Bascomb ’82 has kept close ties with Dartmouth through the years. But now that her daughter, Rosa Van Wie ’12, is a student, the school is even closer to her heart. Living in New Gloucester, Maine, with Rosa’s father, Maine Rep. David Van Wie ’79, Bascomb, a marketing director for a large accounting firm in Portland, visits frequently and says that though some aspects of Dartmouth have changed, the spirit has not. “The core of what I remember and felt while I was there is still the same, and that’s wonderful,” she says. Adds Rosa, “Only Dartmouth people truly understand other Dartmouth people.”

Cheryl: “It’s funny being a Dartmouth mom because it is a lot different from an experience standpoint, but there’s so much that’s the same. It’s an easy campus to navigate, the feeling is familiar and the culture and values are still the same. It’s still Dartmouth.”

Rosa: “Oh, Mommy, I’m doing rush at KKG tonight."

Cheryl: “That’s great! I was a Kappa as a junior when I was there. I heard you liked Tri-Delt too?”

Rosa: “Yeah, it was fun.”

Cheryl: “It’s so nice that there’s this immediate flow of information now from students to their parents. She can talk to me by cell or on Facebook and post pictures for me. I couldn’t do that with my mother. The benefits are that I’m not completely out of touch. She always feels she has a connection to home. And as an alum I can connect even more with what she tells me.”

Rosa: “I talked to her last night after a party and I was like, ‘Heorot has really nice bathrooms!’ And she was like, ‘Are we talking about the same Heorot?’ ”

Cheryl: “I was floored. I didn’t even know Heorot had bathrooms. Socially, things have changed a lot at Dartmouth. There were obviously fewer women and there were definitely fewer black women. One of the things I’ve seen as a parent is that there are a lot more black women visible in more activities. I think there was just one other black woman playing on the rugby team with me when I was there. Now no one thinks twice. There’s more of a variety of activities that they’re involved in. Cutter Hall was also a big hangout when I was there.”

Rosa: “I’ve never actually been, but some of my friends from Gospel Choir go. I get blitzes from there all the time. I know a lot of African Americans say, ‘There aren’t many of us on campus, it’s so difficult,’ but I think there’s a ton of people. In Gospel Choir and even on the rugby team there are a significant number of African Americans. I don’t really see any racial issues, and being half black and half white I’m very prone to look for them.”

Cheryl: “Yes, things have improved greatly in regard to race relations. Ro, you really should check out Cutter, though.”

Rosa: “I don’t have any time, Mom.”

Cheryl: “Sorry, I forgot. That’s another thing. Though we were busy, I don’t think we had quite so little time as the students now.”

Rosa: “I don’t know how I do it either. I work at Novak Café, I play rugby. I’m taking three courses and one has a lab, so that takes extra time. I’ll go out on Saturdays. Then I do Gospel Choir two nights and I’m on the Winter Carnival committee. I’ll usually do my homework in the morning or quite late at night.”

Cheryl: “My goodness. We just had classes and practices.”

Rosa: “I have to go, Mom. I need to iron my hair and then get to practice and then I have rush.”

Cheryl: “Good Lord, girl.”

Rosa: “Love you, Mommy!”

Martha and Margi Born and raised in Alaska, Margi Dashevsky ’10 came a long way from home. But knowing that her mother, Martha Raynolds ’78, skied the same trails she did and studied in the same classrooms made Hanover a place as close to her heart as Fairbanks. “When my mom came to visit it was nice that it was a special place for her, too,” Margi says. They also share a love of the outdoors and a passion for the environment. Martha is an Arctic botanist who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks last year and Margi was an environmental studies major.

Margi: “I like to think of myself as an independent person. Then I realized after I came here that I’m pretty much following in my mom’s footsteps.”

Martha: “It’s great having a daughter with the same interests. She tells me what books to read and what the latest issues are. But Dartmouth isn’t the same place it was when I was there.”

Margi: “The Outing Club has changed a lot. I was a leader in Cabin & Trail. That’s a very gender-balanced group compared to some of the others. I think it was pretty gradual for the club as a whole to be more inclusive of women. My mom found a nicer community in the ski team.”

Martha: “There wasn’t a lot of interaction between the women’s and men’s teams. Ours was definitely second rate in terms of the equipment we had, but that was to be expected. I still found it more welcoming than the DOC.”

Margi: “I love skiing, but the ski team was too much of a commitment for me! It’s intense.”

Martha: “I could tell when I dropped Margi off for her freshman trip that the DOC is now a much more welcoming group. It does a great job of saying ‘We’re so glad you’re here and we’re happy to have you as a new friend,’ as opposed to, ‘This is the way it is—learn from us.’ Margi sent me a paper she wrote on the DOC that had some insights about it being more accepting of women, but there’s still a link between masculinity and doing things in the outdoors in regards to strength and endurance.”

Margi: “Yeah, there’s a mentality that if you’re not pushing yourself really hard, you’re not really climbing. And there’s little value in finesse and agility as opposed to brute strength. The climbing culture can be hyper-masculine at times.”

Martha: “The campus has also changed a lot in terms of dining and housing options. There are so many alternative places to eat now, and the students have more space and privacy in the dorms. I lived in the co-op house freshman year and then in a few apartments in town.”

Margi: “I lived off-campus, too, on the organic farm about a 15-minute bike ride north on Route 10. If you live there, you work on the farm. I also started the Sustainable Living Center with some friends freshman spring by knocking on a lot of administrators’ doors. It’s a dorm for 19 students that opened in 2008. In the first year residents reduced their electricity consumption by 58 percent. I hope it becomes more of a resource center, as well, because there’s so much to learn about all the inputs and outputs of a house and how to reduce our ecological footprint.”

Martha: “Even though we share a lot of the same interests, she’s faced with a lot of different issues. Margi is looking at a much different world than I did.”

Sheila and Sally When Sheila (Kay) Cooper ’82 decided she wanted to go to her father’s alma mater, he was not exactly encouraging. “Dartmouth isn’t a place for women,” he told her. “It’s a manly place.” In fact, it still was in many ways, but Cooper was determined. Two decades later, when her own daughter was accepted, Sheila, now a project manager for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission in Austin, and her dad, Gordon Kay ’52, were ecstatic. “My grandfather took me to dinner and said it would make him so proud and happy if I chose Dartmouth,” says Sally Cooper ’10, who lived in Panarchy, just down the hall from where Grandpa once slept. “I loved being in Hanover and walking across the Green, knowing that my mom and dad and grandfather walked the same paths. It's made Dartmouth more of a spiritual place for me.”

Shelia: “When I went to Dartmouth there was a different feeling in regard to women on campus. My husband, Kent [Cooper ’82], says, ‘You girls wouldn’t even look at us!’ There were just too many men. It was overwhelming. And we were so busy just trying to be one of the guys. Someone joked that the only cleavage he ever saw at Dartmouth was when fat John would bend over to pick something up off the floor. It’s true. I remember my ‘going out’ outfit was a turtleneck with strawberries on it, a red sweatshirt, terrible jeans and red L.L.Bean duck shoes. Sally went to the frat basements in flip-flops. I was saying, ‘Oh, no!’ ”

Sally: “I know. I’m from Austin, though, and I just can’t wear normal shoes. But I did start wearing Uggs to the frats."

Sheila: “In my senior year we established the first sorority house [Sigma Kappa, now Sigma Delta]. The national ladies bought us really fancy furniture—velvet settees and French Colonial pieces. Our reaction was, ‘This is sooo not going to work here.’ We put plastic all over everything. It was not a good thing. The ladies were disgusted by us. Sigma Kappa girls at other colleges wore pantyhose to football games, and we Dartmouth girls didn’t even own skirts. I had one dress for formals, just one.”

Sally: “I had a dress for every night of the week. People wear things out to frat basements now that you’d see at the nicest club in New York. They wear elaborate outfits with a lot of jewelry and the right shoes. Even the boys wear button-down shirts. Dartmouth has become really fashionable.”

Sheila: “I hated those big weekends when girls would come up from the girls' schools and sleep in our common areas. And all the fraternities would road trip to their schools. A lot of the guys married girls from Colby Sawyer and Wellesley. There just weren’t enough of us to go around. Another thing that’s changed is that when I went to Dartmouth I didn’t even know what a gay person was, and now Sally’s best friends are gay.”

Sally: “About half of my male friends are openly gay. And I was in a gender studies class called ‘Queer Marriage, Hate Crimes and Will & Grace.’ ”

Sheila: “The he-men of Dartmouth are turning over.”

Sally: “Being gay now at Dartmouth is not a stigma at all. One of my friends came out at Theta and all the guys were so supportive. Even in my queer marriage class we had a lot of straight guys. It’s awesome that the campus has become so accepting.”

Sheila: “It was so different when I was there. We still had the Indian mascot. It was very conservative.”

Sally: “I like that my mom knows Dartmouth so well. She even knew about the fog cutter parties at Bones Gate. She was like, ‘Stay away!’ And I was like, ‘That’s my favorite.’ ”

Sheila: “Or that nasty punch at Phi Delt."

Sally: “Phi Delt rocks!”

Sheila: “I do wish I had taken more advantage of the cultural things to do up there. Sally, you did a better job of keeping up with that than I did.”

Sally: “Yeah, I even bought a Film Society pass.”

Sheila: “I just wanted her to be able to experience everything that’s there.”

Ellen, Paula and Karen Twins Paula and Karen Sen ’10 had no desire to go to Dartmouth, and they especially didn’t want to go to college together. They did apply to humor their mother, however, and Dimensions Weekend (for accepted students) convinced them otherwise. They decided to follow in the footsteps of mom Ellen (Sullivan) Sen ’77 after all. An engineer with General Electric who lives in Melrose, Massachusetts, Ellen recalls a very different Dartmouth than her daughters experienced. “We felt the hostility so we had to be somewhat courageous, " she says, “but most of the guys in my class wanted us there—and more of us.”

Ellen: “I was in the second freshman class of women at Dartmouth, and we were very aware that we were the outsiders. I had a rock thrown through my second-floor window at Mid Mass. We dressed like lumberjacks to fit in. We even kept ‘Men of Dartmouth’ because we wanted to be very respectful of the traditions.”

Karen: “My mom is a different breed. She’s a real saint. She can really get along with anyone and doesn’t let too much bother her. She was also very busy, majoring in engineering, so she was studying a lot and didn’t get caught up in the social scene.”

Paula: “Our mom also has four brothers, so she was really comfortable hanging with the guys and not as shocked by their antics as much as some other girls might have been.”

Ellen: “There was a 9-to-1 ratio. And, boy, you knew it when you went to the dining hall. But I found it to be a challenge and kind of fun. You could get a lot of attention if you wanted it.”

Karen: “Who wouldn’t like that ratio?”

Paula: “It’s even now, but I think it’s still a male-dominated campus in the sense that most of the social events are at fraternities. I really like the guys here. I think some guys are still sexist and it’s unfortunate, but….”

Karen: “…It’s certain individuals, not the guys as a whole.”

Paula: “Right. And it’s also a product of the campus being so small that anything you see or say or hear comes back over and over. It’s like high school in that sense.”

Ellen: “It was like high school then, too, with some of the stupid jokes the guys would play on the girls. I remember one time the guys from Theta Delt sang about us for a competition on the steps of Thayer. One line was something like, ‘Our co-hogs go to bed alone…,’ and the dean of the college gave them first prize. You just had to laugh.”

Karen: “The campus now goes a long way to bring men and women together to talk about gender issues. This isn’t my mom’s Dartmouth. It’s far, far different. She came up for the ‘35 years of coeducation’ weekend in 2007 and one panel talked about it still being a sexist place. But listening to the women who were here 35 years ago, it's clear we have come a long way.”

Paula: “Are we getting better? Yes, we are. And at the end of the day we’re all good people who mean well.”

Ellen: “The spirit of Dartmouth has never changed. I remember when I got married to my husband all my friends from Dartmouth were at one table and his friends from Harvard were at another. Inevitably, they started singing college songs. At the Dartmouth tables everyone knew all the words and they were really into it. The Harvard people just couldn’t compete.”

Paula: “Since my mom loved it here so much we actually didn’t want to go. It was ‘her’ school. We didn’t want to follow in her footsteps. We came to visit kicking and screaming. Then we both ended up loving it. I think everyone would agree that Dartmouth does a really good job of selling Dartmouth.”

Ellen: “It was a nice surprise. They were really sold on the spirit.”

Karen: “I actually have an entry in my diary from second grade when Mom brought us up in 1997 for a reunion, which we hated. Everything is spelled wrong. I wrote, ‘Right now I’m sitting on a bed at Dartmath. The beds are uncomforble and the food is yucky. I don’t want to go to collage here.’ ”

Ellen: “She has it framed on her wall now. It’s so cute.”

Paula: “Now we love everything about Dartmouth, and the prospect of not being here next year is completely depressing."

Lillian and Adelaide Choosing to spend her winter quarter on a foreign study trip to New Zealand demonstrates that Adelaide Giornelli ’12 “is a very smart girl from the South,” says her mother Lillian (Cousins) Giornelli ’82, the director of a charitable foundation in Atlanta. “She figured out a way to get two summers in one year.” Indeed, adjusting to the frigid temperatures of Hanover wasn’t easy for the Georgia native, but she’s quickly adapted—just as easily as her mother did 30 years ago.

Adelaide: “I knew Dartmouth was a good school, but at first I didn’t want to follow my mom because we’d gone to the same high school and grew up in the same town. I also didn’t want to go because she brought me to Homecoming when I was in fourth grade and I just remember being terrified of this enormous fire and all these insane people running around. Then I came up for the Dimensions program and changed my mind. It’s pretty cool being here now. We have a nice shared experience to talk about.”

Lillian: “Even in my day there was a diverse community, so being from the South didn’t make me feel too much like a fish out of water. But whenever I’d walk down the hall of my dorm and say I was ‘fixin’ to go to dinner’ I got a lot of strange looks.”

Adelaide: “Yeah, people freak out when I say ‘y’all.’ They don’t really understand. People aren’t really sure what to do with that. But I don’t really have much of an accent, do I?”

Lillian: “You do run into people who have preconceived misconceptions about people who come from the South. I got asked a lot of questions about whether I had electricity or plumbing. I’m not sure how much that’s changed.”

Adelaide: “People know I have plumbing, Ma!”

Lillian: “Adelaide has an even broader group of friends—more coed than my friends were. I lived in an all-female hall. Adelaide’s dorms have been completely coed. I didn’t join a sorority. I was on the rugby team. There are so many more options now with women’s groups and varsity teams and club teams. And more social activities. I’m glad that’s available for her now.”

Adelaide: “I’m definitely not strong enough to play rugby. I play Ultimate Frisbee and I pledged Sigma Delt last fall and I’m in the Rockapellas. Am I much busier than you were, Mom?”

Lillian: “From the outside looking in it seems like there is so much more to do. In particular the opportunity for volunteerism has dramatically expanded. The Tucker Foundation didn’t have a huge presence when I was there. There’s a lot more opportunity to do more service in the community. And these kids now grow up being overscheduled, so they’re used to a lot of activities. Everything was much less complicated when I was young. I didn’t start thinking about college or going on a visit until my senior fall in high school. And I think all my friends would say, because of the quality of the kids applying, we wouldn’t get into Dartmouth today.”

Adelaide: “I would have waited too if I could have, but my mom was freaking out. I tried not to pay attention to the pressure. My high school was pretty competitive, and there was a point when everyone was talking about the SATs and ACTs. No one could shut up about it. And when one person would get into college, everyone would find out and talk about it. I didn’t even know where I wanted to go, though. I think I gave my mother a couple of gray hairs.”

Lillian: “The students now are more wildly enthusiastic about being there, too. The thing that’s so funny to me about Dartmouth today is this concept of flair. I’ve never been up there and not seen two-thirds of the students in some form of costume.”

Adelaide: “Mom, that was Homecoming. It’s just on big weekends where people go a little crazy. Mom came up with two of her best friends and they told me stories about her that she’d never told me before. It was a lot of fun. I hope I stay as close to my friends from here as my mom has with hers.”

Lillian: “You know we can all talk about what a great education you get at Dartmouth and agree on that, but it’s the bonds that get made in those four years in Hanover that mean the most to me. That’s why I’m so thrilled that Adelaide is there and building those same strong relationships with a core group of friends who will stay in her life beyond college. There’s that Dartmouth tie that binds, and it is a wonderful thing.”

Jennifer Wulff is a freelance writer who lives in Norwalk, Connecticut. Her daughter, Bailey, is a potential candidate for the class of 2029.