Sportin’ those cutoff jeans and Dartmouth swag behind the Asian Studies Center, c. 1989
This year, Dartmouth College is celebrating its 250th anniversary. I was glad to have the chance to touch base with my alma mater last summer when I took my two daughters to Hanover to join the Camp Dartmouth experience. As I wrote in another journal entry, we had a fabulous time on campus and enjoyed hiking, swimming and canoeing as well.
Summer was always the most magical time at Dartmouth, unless of course you were into winter sports. But since my skiing accident in 1986–an event that ironically brought me closer to Dartmouth and may have influenced my decision to apply there the following year—I haven’t been much of a skier, and the thought of hurtling down the ski jump on our campus filled me with dread. For me, winters were about surviving the cold, icy, snowy clime of northern New England. To be fair, I grew up in Massachusetts, and so New England winters weren’t alien to me, but Hanover was always colder than Boston and winters there were to be endured.
I do have one nice memory of strolling at night across the snowy campus with a friend in the Chamber Singers, singing Simon and Garfunkel songs in harmony. This is one of countless Dartmouth moments that made up the tapestry of my college education. And a rich tapestry it was. I’ve written many entries about my experiences at Dartmouth in previous posts, including being part of the Chamber Singers, which was easily one of the best things I did there.
The other thing of course was studying Chinese language, literature, and history. I’ve written elsewhere about that experience and how it drew me away from a math&science trajectory into the field of Asian studies. Studying Chinese and living in the Asian Studies Center (now the Chinese Language House) were certainly among the most rewarding and memorable experiences of my college education. So was studying abroad in Taiwan for several months and traveling around Mainland China in 1988 and 1989.
While swimming wasn’t something I did throughout my college years, my first year at Dartmouth was dominated largely by my experiences on the Men’s Swim Team. Those trips we took to compete with other schools were certainly among the highlights of my first year at Dartmouth, as was our brutal but fun week-long training session in an Olympic swimming pool in Orlando Florida during winter break. The camaraderie we developed in the pool, on the road, and during our wild parties, including one held in a cabin in the woods with the Women’s Team, made it easy to reconnect with fellow swimmer during our 25th reunion in 2016.
One thing I really appreciated about Dartmouth and still do so, looking back thirty years later, was the accessibility of the professors. During my college years, I spent many an hour chatting with professors and getting to know them outside of the classroom. I took full advantage of their office hours, even if I didn’t have an emergency situation with a paper or an exam. I found that most of the profs at Dartmouth were more than willing to share some of their time with me, and I often learned the most valuable things while talking to them one on one. For me this made sense, since I’d determined that I was going to go on to earn a PhD and become one of them some day. I also recall many occasions when I was invited to professors’ homes for dinner or out to a local restaurant for lunch. I look back on these experiences as some of the most memorable and valuable ones of my four years in Hanover.
While I explored a wide range of course subjects at Dartmouth, I often made sure that I had some time in my schedule to study and pursue learning without the aid of courses and profs. I was sometimes able to underload and take two courses (Dartmouth has the trimester system known as the D Plan, and the normal load is three courses over a nine-week period, or at least it was in my day). I would spend my extra hours reading books of interest or pursuing subjects that I was keen to learn on my own. I did not do these for credits or for “independent study”, but rather for the sheer joy of learning.
While at Dartmouth, I spent a great deal of time studying music, particularly classical music. I spent many fine hours listening to recordings and looking at scores in the music library and reading books about classical music. I include the romantic and modern composers in this broad term, not just Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Over those years I became entranced by the works of Chopin, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Dvorak, and Rachmaninov among others. I studied the piano with a wonderful teacher named Diane Hewson, and I attended many musical performances with fellow students and professional musicians. I was not competitive at all in this sphere, but I loved learning from others and absorbing their own passion and drive for playing and listening to fine music. This in addition to my years of singing and performing with the Chamber Singers and our conductor Melinda O’Neal gave me a much deeper appreciation for the western musical canon, and all without earning one credit or grade.
I pretty much did the same with modern world literature. I was always reading novels, and over those years I took in a wide variety of world literature, ranging from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace to Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. I read quite a few of the novels of Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino, and fell deep into Borge’s Labyrinth. I was especially enamored with the inimitable Thomas Pynchon, whose Gravity’s Rainbow I read twice while in college. I remember devouring Kazantzakis’s classic novel The Last Temptation of Christ around the time the film came out.
I also devoured quite a few books of history, particularly Chinese history, including Barbara Tuchman’s classic study of General Joseph Stilwell, and some of Jonathan Spence’s and John King Fairbank’s works among others. And I continued my interest in the sciences, especially the brain sciences, trying to keep up with some of the literature on AI, neural networks and other subjects of fascination.
Yet not once did I take an official course on literature, even though Dartmouth’s reputation in literary studies was quite high (I did take an intro humanities course where we read Dante and other classic works, but for some reason I dropped it). Nor for that matter did I take any courses on neuroscience, with the exception of a course on Cognitive Psychology taught by Jamshed Barucha.
I think when it comes down to it, I was always more motivated by reading books out of my own interest and at my own pace than reading those that profs chose for us. Not that I didn’t do the assigned course readings as well, but there was something far more pleasurable about reading on one’s own, and then having conversations with fellow classmates about the literature we were reading.
I do recall one evening having one of those impromptu conversations with a classmate I bumped into on the quad, where we ended up comparing the two Thomases, Pynchon and Mann, and their concepts of time. He was encouraging me to read The Magic Mountain. I found the English version of that novel at that time way too cumbersome, and so it wasn’t until decades letter that I read a fine new translation of that classic work recommended by my dad, and it remains one of my favorites to this day.
Looking back, I think that the most intense learning I did in my college years was through conversations, discussions, even heated arguments with my classmates outside the classroom. Talking to students from different regional and political backgrounds, who consequently had different value systems, could be a painful experience, but it was always educational. I was shocked at first to learn that some of my classmates didn’t subscribe to evolutionary theory, or that they didn’t take seriously claims about gender or racial equality. I also had some difficult conversations with international students who were hyper critical of the USA. Looking back thirty years later, these were some of the best conversations I engaged in, and most if not all of them were held late at night in dorm rooms, in fraternity basements, out on the quad, or in bars while abroad.
All of this is not to denigrate what I learned in the classroom. Through the painful process of constant critical feedback, I was able to hone my reading, writing, analytical, and synthesizing skills. Even though I gave up on a math&science trajectory partway through, I still loved spending hours solving math equations or coming up with alternative proofs for mathematical problems. Probably my favorite assignments were the research papers I wrote for my history courses, which explains why I chose to become an academic and a historian. And occasionally I found the lectures of my profs inspiring, but mostly I enjoyed the classroom activities and discussions with my peers.
Thus, it was the dialectic between formal learning in the classroom and informal learning on one’s own that made up my college education, and which has shaped my own educational philosophy since then. As a college professor and an administrator, I try my best to embody those ideals by spending quality time with students outside the classroom whenever possible. I love going on field trips with students, which is one reason why I chose to live and work here in China. I also hold regular events in my home in Kunshan, where I invite students to share my love for music. I hope that my students will also look back on these experiences as an integral part of their education at DKU.
Me atop Mt. Moosilauke in 1989
Among my most cherished memories of my Dartmouth college days were the hikes and walks we took in the nearby Green and White Mountains. My first experience at Dartmouth was the Freshman Trips (now called the First Year Trips), where upper classmen (and women) took us on three-day excursions into the wilderness. I chose to join the most intense hike into the White Mountains, which I’d been hiking since a young lad, and some enduring friendships came out of that experience.
Our freshmen trip into the White Mountains, led by Cliff Bernstein ‘89 (third from right)
I still keep in touch with some of the folks in that group, including trip leader Cliff Bernstein ‘89, one of my most cherished friends from my Dartmouth days (it helps that Cliff has also lived in East Asia for most of his adult life). Later I joined the Dartmouth Outing Club and had many great experiences hiking mountain trails with other DOC members, including an epic hike up Mt. Washington. To this day, while I lead a largely urban existence, I still love heading to the mountains and I enjoy taking students on hikes (lately it’s more them taking me…). Fortunately, this year I got to co-lead two field trips for DKU students into mountainous regions of China.
Needless to say, I am incredibly thankful for the four years I spent at Dartmouth, even if one of those years was mainly in East and Southeast Asia. I try to reconnect with my alma mater whenever possible; our 25th Reunion of the class of 1991 was an amazing opportunity to do so, as I wrote in an entry back in 2016. I am trying to be more consistent about giving back to the College these days, and hope to do more interviewing here in China in the future. Some of my best and most enduring friendships here in Asia are with fellow Dartmouth alums who chose to settle in this part of the world, such as Cliff Bernstein ‘89, Matt Roberts ‘90, David Spindler ‘89, Jeff Sprafkin ‘87, Micah Dortch ‘05, and many, many others.
Above all, I’m grateful to my parents for giving me the opportunity to attend Dartmouth and for taking out loans and mortgages that would ensure I didn’t have to pay them back myself after graduating. While I did my share of work in those four years, serving as a drill instructor for Chinese language and later writing the manual for drill instructors that was used for decades, there was no way that this sort of work could help pay those college tuition and housing bills. I was fortunate to have a step-father who not only was a Dartmouth grad himself (Andrew Bodge ‘72), but whose father was also a Dartmouth alum, and so in that sense I am indeed a legacy. And not only did my step-dad Andy take me on many a hike in the White Mountains in my youth, but he also helped pay for my education. Not all children of separated or divorced parents are so lucky.
In closing this piece, I wish my alma mater a happy 250th anniversary. “Though round the girdled earth we roam, her spell on us remains.”
Andrew Field ‘91
Shanghai