In mid-September of 1964, I was the sole passenger on what the conductor said would be the Boston and Maine Railroad’s final run between Boston and White River Junction, Vermont. It was just me, a little green steamer trunk, and the portable Olivetti typewriter my dad had given me. When my taxi rolled up Main Street and passed the Hanover Inn, I caught my first glimpse of a campus that seemed almost too perfect, as if a crew from Hollywood had erected fake building fronts like a Western movie set. What I did not know, could not know, was that for this 18-year-old freshman, it was Groundhog Day. I would be rematriculating at Dartmouth two more times during the next seven years. 

Though filled with bright moments, my passage through college was not always smooth. I first flunked out at the end of my junior year. I was angry. Rebellious. Worried about my mother, who had been diagnosed with melanoma. Only my fear of disappointing my folks and the looming military draft kept me from dropping out. Instead, I purposely let my grades slip, knowing the College eventually would force me to leave. Which it did, in June 1967. Crushed and confused, I slunk home to the nation’s capital.

I spent the next two years in academic exile and did some crazy things, such as getting clocked by the police going 80 m.p.h. over the speed limit in my dad’s 1964 Buick Riviera after my girlfriend dumped me. But I also did some things that made my traumatized parents proud. I wrote a treatment for a drug education film for children that won an award. And I landed a job in the films and photographs division of the Library of Congress. This gave me financial independence and medical insurance, which helped pay for the shrink I had engaged to help me sort things out. 

Shortly after my mother died in February 1969, the same doctor asked me what I planned to do with the rest of my life. When I told him I wanted to complete my college studies, he phoned Dartmouth and got Dean Thaddeus Seymour on the line. He handed me the receiver.

The dean invited me to reapply.

I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t anxious when I entered the conference room next to Seymour’s office to formally plead my case to a committee of College elders. I expected to be grilled about my academic meltdown and why I thought I deserved a second chance. Instead, I was met with extraordinary kindness. The men seated around the table encouraged me to take another shot at earning my degree.

When I returned to Hanover in the fall of 1969, this former clean-cut preppy had a beard and hair down to his shoulders. I did not stand out. In my two-year absence, Dartmouth, like most colleges in America, had changed. For support, I brought the family dog with me. Irving the Weimaraner was a popular addition to the North Topliff Hall community until he bit a janitor. The dog was quarantined at a country vet to see if he developed rabies. He did not. When I went to pick him up, I chatted in the waiting room with a tall, friendly man wearing a three-piece suit. When the vet brought out the man’s dachshund on a leash, he addressed him as “Mr. Salinger.” 

Having learned the hard way that dogs cannot dwell in Dartmouth dorms, Irving and I found lodging across the river in Norwich, Vermont, where we hunkered down with four other students in a house on Meadowbrook Lane. Every night, we fell asleep listening to the water racing over rocks in a nearby stream. One evening, four of us went to the Hopkins Center to see a play in which our fifth housemate had been cast in a leading role. She was a senior at Vassar College, spending a trimester in Hanover under an exchange program. Her name was Meryl Streep. 

Had I graduated on time, I never would have met these intriguing people. Nor would I have had a chance to study, along with a handful of other lucky students, under exiled American film director Joseph Losey ’29, whose 1948 allegorical assault on McCarthyism, The Boy with Green Hair, got him blacklisted. I was thrilled when the aging auteur awarded me a B for the documentary I made for his class. Could this be my own first step toward a successful career in film?

Had I gone straight through Dartmouth, I also would have missed the chance to study under visiting UNC-Chapel Hill professor Eugene Falk, whose entire course consisted of analyzing an essay and writing a paper about a tragic hero. Falk made us acutely aware of the mechanism by which men ennoble and destroy themselves—in life as well as in literature. 

English professor James M. Cox taught me another useful lesson, one that would cause me once again to hit the road. I submitted a paper to Cox with the opening sentence: “I ain’t no literary critic.” I boasted that I had not read the book he assigned. The bespectacled pedagogue was not amused. In his Sanborn Library office, I begged him to raise my grade. The D he gave me would lead to my second academic dismissal, for failing to maintain the GPA required of a probationary student.

“If you don’t help me,” I pleaded, “I’ll be drafted and sent to Vietnam.” 

Cox was unmoved. 

“Some day, you’ll thank me for this, son,” he assured me.

At the time, I did not agree. In retrospect, I am grateful. As adults, we are responsible for our actions. Period. If we choose not to play by the rules, as I did on my second pass through Dartmouth, we must accept the consequences. 

In June 1970, I began my third and final assault on Hanover Hill by landing on the dean’s list for the first time. Only the giant horseflies that bit chunks out of my flesh spoiled a perfect summer of softball on the Green, outings with my geology class into the countryside, and hanging out with a gang of amiable misfits in the former Tau Epsilon Phi house. 

I enrolled in a poetry seminar taught by Pulitzer Prize-winning English professor and poet-in-residence Richard Eberhart ’26. In the living room of his Hanover home, he regaled us with colorful tales of some of the famous poets he had known. Poets, we learned, were as flawed as the rest of us.

My peripatetic academic career ended in January 1971—more than six years after I had arrived—when the College awarded me a degree in English literature. There was no ceremony. No beaming relatives. No flying mortarboards. My diploma arrived by mail. But the boy who had enrolled in 1964 had become a man, one who always would be grateful for the opportunities the College had offered. Each time I stumbled, someone who believed in second chances had helped me up, allowing a student from both the old and the new Dartmouth to finish the race.                    

Jonathan Agronsky went on to earn a master’s from Carnegie Mellon University and embarked on a writing career. He lives in Pinehurst, North Carolina.